Facebook Passes Blogger, Falls Behind MySpace In Engagement
I recently read a blog on techcrunch where they delved deeper into latest set ofComscore
data. It seems that Facebook continues to show tremendous growth, and may well catch up to MySpace in terms of U.S. unique visitors by 2010. But another interesting trend, and one that is important to advertisers, are the increases in engagement both networks have seen over the past year - a metric that MySpace has been building a firm lead in.
MySpace saw the number of minutes each U.S. user spent on the site per month grow 15%, to 266.3 minutes - a new record for the social network, and a 31% increase since last January. Facebook has also shown an increase over the last month, growing 4% since December to an average of 176.6 minutes per user, but has only grown around 3% year over year. And MySpace is still beating Facebook by around 90 minutes per user.
As the graph below shows, MySpace has had the advantage here for quite a while, but the recent spike is likely due to the site’s launch of MySpace Music, as well as growth inMySpace Video. In the struggling economy people are spending more time at home, which tends to benefit these media-heavy sites.
Page views are also up for both social networks, at least in the short term. MySpace’s page views are up nearly 10% since December to 579 pages per user per month, while Facebook has grown around 3% in the same time period to 337. Figures for both sites are smaller than they were a year ago, likely because they have both been introducing UI improvements like AJAX that don’t force users to refresh their page for every action. Such improvements generally help with lengthening visits as users are less likely to get frustrated, but they also lead to deflated page views.
Although these metrics talk about engagement, it is also quite clear that they havent been able to translate all the traffic to profits. Maybe its time they changed the definition of engagement and start looking at not just how long ppl were on the site but what they were doing and *feeling* when they were online!
January 25th, 2010 at 7:00 pm
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