Facebook Blows Past MySpace In Global Visitors For May
In April, Facebook caught up to MySpace in worldwide unique visitors (actually nudging past it with 116.4 million unique visitors versus 115.7 million for MySpace). Now the worldwide comScore numbers are out for May and Facebook continues …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the crossover moment in the Facebook–MySpace rivalry. As recently as January 2008, coverage argued MySpace was still dominating traffic, and by September 2007 Facebook had only just reached third place in page views while MySpace's page views fell nearly 20%. The comScore May figures — 116.4 million worldwide uniques for Facebook in April versus 115.7 million for MySpace — mark the first sustained lead in a race that had been tightening all year.
First-order effects
- Facebook now holds the global audience crown by unique visitors, shifting bragging rights and press narrative decisively in its favor after months of near-parity.
- MySpace's position as the default social network is directly challenged; its remaining advantages are domestic page views and ad inventory rather than reach.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and measurement buyers will re-rank the two platforms on worldwide reach, accelerating budget migration toward Facebook even before its monetization catches up — a gap later closed when Facebook ad revenue was projected to surpass MySpace the following year.
- The rivalry shifts from raw traffic to engagement quality and revenue per user, prompting side-by-side analyses like traffic-versus-ad-revenue comparisons using Google Trends published the very next day.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social networking consolidates around a single global winner whose scale compounds — a trajectory that continued as Facebook climbed toward 700 million users and drew record U.S. visitors alongside Twitter by mid-2011.
- Measurement firms like comScore become kingmakers: whichever service tops their monthly rankings shapes advertiser perception, making third-party traffic data a structural battleground between platforms.
The trend: This is an early data point in the consolidation of social networking into one dominant global platform, where network effects convert audience leadership into durable advertising dominance.