The social networking “wars” are heating up. MySpace and Facebook have both become major players online, and the rivalry between the two biggest social networking sites is beginning to resemble the “cola wars” of the 1980s between Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
Until now, MySpace has had the edge, with more members globally, and more page views on average than Facebook. But a new report from the online metrics company ComScore indicates that Facebook is now pulling ahead of the competition, and recently overtook MySpace as the most popular social networking web site online.
The report notes that Facebook took the lead over MySpace for the first time in April of 2008, pulling ahead of their rival by nearly 10 million unique visitors for the month. Statistically, Facebook had approximately 124 million unique visitors to their site in May, barely edging out my spaces estimated 115 million unique visitors.
Facebook has come a long way in a relatively short period of time. The web site, which was founded by Mark Zuckerberg back in 2004 when he was still an undergraduate at Harvard University, began by restricting membership to students with .edu e-mail addresses. Over time, Facebook has expanded to include the general public, and has quickly became a major player online.
Facebook’s biggest competition has always been MySpace, which was bought out by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in 2005. MySpace continues to be more popular in the US, but Facebook’s expansion into the global market has been rapid and well thought out, allowing them to overtake MySpace globally. Facebook’s popularity is also growing in the US, though they still only attract about half the number of unique visitors every month as the massive MySpace.
This January, Facebook announced plans to translate different versions of its site into a variety of world languages. Analysts believe this move is helping Facebook grow substantially in overseas markets. Ironically, MySpace has had foreign-language versions of their site available since 2006, though they have not seen the kind of astronomical growth worldwide that Facebook is showing this year. Facebook’s French language site, for example, is proving to be a resounding success in France and other French speaking countries. The company has also debuted Chinese and Russian language versions of Facebook, bringing the total number of languages available to 20.
Even though Facebook is experiencing a healthy growth spurt, the company is still struggling to monetize their immense popularity, as is MySpace. To industry analysts, it is still unclear whether social networking sites can be monetized in any significant way. MySpace has recently announced plans to increase advertising on their site, including contextually targeted ads on user profile pages. Facebook may need to follow suit in order to profit from their expanding popularity.
[...] at a faster rate than MySpace, and is poised to remain at the top of the social networking heap, recently passing MySpace up in traffic figures. What this means to you as an online marketer is millions of potential [...]
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