Facebook now ranked 3rd in Page Views; MySpace down nearly 20%
MySpace has enjoyed a relatively long and successful run as in a red hot sector of the internet, but it may not be long before the site has to defend this title. Facebook, having gone through big changes about every three months …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's climb to third place in page views comes on the back of a relentless product cadence — Compete describes it as shipping major changes about every three months — capped most recently by its September 5 launch of public profile search, which let anyone look up a specific person on the platform and traded away some of its long-standing privacy assurances in exchange for reach.
MySpace, meanwhile, has held the top of the red-hot social networking sector for a comparatively long run, but Compete's numbers show its page views falling nearly 20% even as Facebook is estimated to be worth upward of $1 billion. The ranking matters because page views are the currency social networks sell to advertisers.
First-order effects
- Facebook enters September ranked third in page views just days after opening profiles to public search, giving its sales pitch to advertisers a traffic-growth story at the exact moment its rival's numbers turn negative.
- MySpace's near-20% page-view decline directly shrinks the ad inventory it monetizes, putting pressure on the revenue behind its sector-leading position.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers who allocate display budgets off traffic rankings now face a repricing between the two platforms, with Facebook able to argue momentum and MySpace forced to defend volume.
- MySpace faces pressure to match Facebook's feature velocity, and Facebook's willingness to erode privacy assurances for growth — seen in the public search launch — sets a competitive template rivals may feel compelled to copy.
Third-order effects
- If the divergence holds, social networking leadership shifts from an incumbent that scaled early to a faster-iterating challenger, with the reported $1 billion-plus valuation signaling that capital will keep flowing toward whoever owns the traffic curve.
- Third-party measurement firms like Compete become the de facto scoreboard for the sector, meaning page-view rankings — not declared user counts — increasingly drive advertiser and investor perception.
The trend: Social networking traffic leadership is rotating from MySpace to Facebook as rapid product iteration and loosened privacy defaults convert engagement gains into advertising currency.