Perspective: Myspace Still Kicking Facebook's Ass in Traffic
While the media and Silicon Valley have lost our collective minds over the rise of Facebook over the past year, traffic analysts Hitwise released numbers today indicating that things are not as they might seem.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Facebook takeover narrative had been building for months: by September 2007 Compete had Facebook ranked 3rd in page views while MySpace fell nearly 20%, and by October the Sydney Morning Herald was describing MySpace slipping to middle-of-the-road as Facebook surged. Today's Hitwise numbers cut directly against that arc, showing MySpace still leading Facebook in web traffic — a rare instance of two respected traffic analysts telling opposite stories in the same quarter.
First-order effects
- Advertisers planning social-network buys face conflicting signals on where the larger US audience actually sits, since Compete's panel and Hitwise's ISP data now rank the two networks differently.
- MySpace gets a counter-narrative to pitch against the momentum story, at the moment Facebook is defending itself on other fronts — the Beacon miscues highlighted on 60 Minutes this week and confirmed staff joining the DataPortability.org work group.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's growth story underpins its fresh $15 billion valuation round involving Microsoft, so any credible challenge to the trajectory feeds directly into how the next round of ad deals and partnerships gets priced.
- The measurement dispute pushes both networks' marketing teams toward whichever metric favors them, making third-party traffic firms like Hitwise and Compete arbiters of competitive position rather than neutral bookkeepers.
Third-order effects
- If panel-based and ISP-based rankings can diverge this sharply on the web's most-watched rivalry, trust shifts toward whoever owns first-party behavioral data — an early argument for platforms controlling their own measurement.
- MySpace's August 2007 head start on ad targeting matters again if raw reach holds up: the contest may settle on monetization per user rather than visitor counts alone.
The trend: Social-network leadership claims in 2008 increasingly depend on which measurement methodology wins credibility, as rival analytics firms produce conflicting rankings for the same market.