Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

It was bound to happen at some point, but MySpace has been caught by Facebook in the number of worldwide unique monthly visitors.

While Facebook’s push for a wider foreign audience is having some success (I even see them advertising at English Premier League matches), they are still lagging behind in the United States by a significant margin and aren’t doing much at this point to chip away at it. MySpace’s unique visitors double Facebook’s in the US, and that number hasn’t changed much over the last year.

To consolidate these numbers and answer critics, MySpace will be implementing some big changes to its site over the next month or so, including an improved profile editor, higher quality video, and an better search function.

Reading some comments on various sites about MySpace is always a unique experience. Tech geeks hate MySpace and love to let their feelings about the site be known. There is an interesting article by blogger Danah Boyd about the class divisions between MySpace and Facebook: Boyd argues Facebook is the site more associated with upper-middle class “networkers” or “hegemonic” young people while MySpace has a more populist tilt. Put more simply, Facebook is for the jocks while MySpace is for the punks.

At any rate, marketers like to be where the trendy kids are and Facebook is definitely the place to be in that respect. It is worrying that while Facebook gets all of the attention and adoration in the tech community, they seem to have plateaued in the United States. Michael Arrington, while not going in to detail, questions the value of the increased foreign membership in Facebook when it comes to advertising revenue, and promises more details about this next week in TechCrunch.

One thing is for certain: Facebook’s rise has yet to result in the burying of MySpace, and both sites are maintaining fairly static levels amongst United States visitors. In spite of the tech backlash against MySpace, they are keeping their market share and managing not to lose the “unwashed masses” that still love the site.

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