14 DAY TRIAL // What MySpace has been trying to accomplish for quite a while now, to top Facebook in growth, finally happened this January. News Corp.'s social network has felt Mark Zuckerberg's startup breathing down its neck since the first months the two were competing and the numbers showed last year that Facebook would prove to be the real MySpace killer if left at large.
Various attempts from MS to counter the open platform that Facebook promoted all failed, more or less, to do their intended job. Nevertheless, in a twist of plot due to reasons unclear, the new year turned out to be rather auspicious for the older social network. It saw its visitors' total minutes up 13.3 percent over December numbers, the total number of page views up 13.1 percent and the average minutes a visitor spent on its pages up by 13.7 percent, all over the same period difference.
Facebook, on the other hand, only saw an increase in average minutes per visitor, 1.6 percent. They both recorded drops in total number of uniques and average visits, MS recording 0.4 percent respectively 0.1 percent, and its competitor 2.3 percent, respectively 3.3 percent. Social networks seem to lack the pull their apps had created throughout the second half of last year, some people calling this application fatigue.
Of course, these are only the statistics comScore provided for January, whether it will be a continuing trend or just a mishap is yet to be seen. The numbers did point out that social networks don't have an endless basin from which to pull unique visitors, the finite audience aspect starting to dig into the two managing boards' consciences.
Advertisers seem to get tired of playing the social networks game as well, figures indicating that as few as 4 in 10,000 people, who see ads on such sites, actually click on them. This would explain Google's shortcoming in the area.