14 DAY TRIAL // What many thought was inevitable, based on the trends, has finally happened, as Facebook has officially surpassed MySpace in the US in the number of unique visits. According to the latest data released by research firm comScore, Facebook marginally surpassed MySpace with 70,278 million unique visitors, compared with the latter's 70,255 million. Facebook has been on an ascending trend for a while now, while MySpace has stagnated, so it was only a matter of when, not if, Facebook would become the number-one social networking site in the US.
In May 2009, Facebook grew by 2.8 million unique visitors in the US, with MySpace actually losing about 700,000 uniques in the same month. The numbers represent a four-percent growth from the previous month for Facebook and more than double from May 2008. Earlier estimates showed that MySpace would last as the biggest social network in the US at least until the end of the summer, but it now looks like MySpace is doing even worse than previously thought.
Facebook was already the biggest social network in the world, having surpassed MySpace last year, with over 200 million users, though some unofficial reports put the company at as much as 300 million in April 2009. The same reports estimate MySpace at 126.9 million globally, still making it the second largest social network.
Some of the new traffic to Facebook may come from the recently launched Facebook Vanity URLs, which got a lot of media attention, but the hype was somewhat deserved, as the number of users registering their URL username has reached six million and is still growing. While the feature itself may not be the only one responsible for the growth, the fact that something that MySpace had since its inception, Vanity URLs, got people talking about Facebook so much shows just how much better the company is doing at least in the public eye.