While Facebook seems to get more buzzworthy coverage, MySpace has managed to maintain its strong leadership position in the social networking realm. Well, at least in the U.S. comScore and Hitwise both have MySpace and Facebook listed at one and two, respectively, for the month of May in the U.S.
According to the latest comScore figures, MySpace attracted 73.7 million unique visitors in May, a 7% increase from last May’s 68.9 million figure. Facebook attracted 35.6 million visitors in May, a 34% increase from last year’s audience of 26.6 million.
Flickr’s unique audience was 17.0 million in May, reflecting a 101% increase from last year’s 8.4 million. Classmates Online attracted 14.9 million unique visitors, a 23% increase from last year’s audience of 12.1 million.
LinkedIn saw its audience increase 138% year-over-year, from 1.7 million to 3.9 million. Digg’s audience grew 90%, from 3.3 million to 6.3 million.
Meanwhile, Hitwise indicates that MySpace’s market share of visits to social networking sites in the U.S. was 72.73% in May, a decline from April’s 73.82%, and an even steeper drop off from last May’s 77.72%.
Facebook was second with a 16.24% share, reflecting an increase from April’s 14.80% and last May’s 11.47%.
myYearbook had a market share of 1.40%, followed by Bebo with 1.00%, and Black Planet with 0.90%.
Of the top five social networking sites, Facebook was the least engaging with an average time spent on the site per user of 20 minutes and 21 seconds. myYearbook was the most engaging (30:51), followed by Bebo (30:17), MySpace (29:42), and Black Planet (24:54).
However, comScore also notes that Facebook has overtaken MySpace globally in May, both in terms of unique visitors (123.9 million vs. 114.6 million) and page views (50.6 billion vs. 45.4 billion). Facebook actually overtook MySpace by a sliver in April, but built on its lead during May, according to comScore representatives.
MySpace is working to unveil new advertiser-friendly page layouts this week, while Facebook is also slated to unveil a new user interface in the near future. Facebook, while overtaking MySpace on many levels, is still struggling to cash in with strong advertising performances.
Sources:
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3629976
http://hitwise.com/press-center/hitwiseHS2004/myspace-received-percent-us-visits.php
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1000000097,39437721,00.htm
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