U.S. visits to Facebook gcontinue to grow
U.S. visits to Facebook grew 149% in February compared with the same month a year earlier, according to Hitwise. That pushed Facebook’s market share among users in the United States visiting social networking sites to 36% last month – still behind MySpace, which enjoys a 52% market share despite a 28% percentage drop. MySpace also continues to lead in time spent among the top 5 social networking sites with an average 29:38 per users per month.
Market share of U.S. Internet visits to top five social networking Web sites
Rank Name Feb. 2008 Jan. 2009 Feb. 2009 Y/Y percent change
1 MySpace 72.92% 57.08% 52.21% -28%
2 Facebook 14.46% 31.15% 36.03% 149%
3 Tagged 0.65% 2.33% 2.47% 280%
4 MyYearbook 1.17% 1.67% 1.63% 39%
5 Classmates 1.03% 0.80% 0.82% -20%
Source: Hitwise
Average U.S. time spent among top five social networking Web sites
Rank Name February 2008 February 2009 Y/Y percent change
1 MySpace 30:07 29:38 -2%
2 Facebook 21:00 22:12 6%
3 Tagged 24:56 26:22 6%
4 MyYearbook 31:35 25:22 -20%
5 Classmates 10:19 11:14 9%
Source: Hitwise
Catching up with MySpace Music
It’s been more than five months since MySpace launched MySpace Music–so how’s it doing?
"Our traffic is huge," MySpace Music President Courtney Holt told CNET News in an interview. "Our usage is very high. People are doing a lot of different things with music on our platform." There are currently more than 5 million bands with music on the streaming-and-discovery music service, and more than 100 million playlists have been created, and it was a matter of days before MySpace Music hit its billionth stream.
But the service is still evolving, Holt said, and is willing to change in response to user feedback and criticism. Recently, it’s improved a number of search features, tweaked its music player, and added an "activity feed" to artist pages, among other things. There are also "album pages" that not only give users a hub for purchasing albums, but which also serve as surrogate MySpace pages for artists that may not have created their own.
MySpace, acquired by News Corp. in 2005, got its start as a hub for all things independent music before it turned into the world’s largest social-networking site–only to be usurped by Facebook last year. Since midway though 2008, we’ve seen a lot of signs that MySpace has changed its strategy to reflect a return to its music and media roots. The biggest of these, obviously, was the launch of MySpace Music, a joint venture with the major record labels.
See the full article at Webware.
Study Links Blogs, MySpace And Album Sales
When Ghostface Killah [click to read] professed his disappointment last year about the lack of sales for The Big Doe Rehab [click to read] compared to the amount of friends he had listed on his MySpace page, questions on the real influence the giant networking site had already been raised.
In a recent study titled, “Does Chatter Matter? The Impact of User-Generated Content on Music Sales,” New York University researchers looked to reveal this problem concerning online content and sales, and whether or not there was a way for music Web sites to increase sales inadvertently through independent content.
With MySpace being one of the major resources for fans to check out their favorite artists, researchers hypothesized that, “On average, a band with thousands of friends on MySpace to be more popular with MySpace users than a band with a handful,” thus selling more albums in the first month. Using the rankings of Amazon.com, one of the world’s largest online retailers, researchers determined the outcome of their studies surprising to say the least.
For one, they found that an increase in MySpace friends for an artist did not correlate to an increase in sales. Not only that, but the amount of MySpace friends did not serve as a strong indicator for album sales in general.
On the other hand, blogs that posted content of artists repeatedly on their sites, termed “blog chatter,” resulted in relatively more sales for the artist. Through this study, it would seem that Ghostface’s concerns and artists expectations in general for sales should now be attributed to blogs rather than label-invested outlets.
See the original article at Hip Hop News.
Social Networking More Popular Than Email
New stats from Nielsen Online show that by the end of 2008, social networking had overtaken email in terms of worldwide reach. According to the study, 66.8% of Internet users across the globe accessed “member communities” last year, compared to 65.1% for email. The most popular online activities remain search and Web portals (with around 85% reach) and the websites of software manufacturers.
The far-reaching study also explored a number of other trends within the social networking space. In 2008, users spent 63% more time on member communities than they did in the previous year. However, within member communities, Facebook saw growth of 566% in time spent on it by users worldwide. As has been reported elsewhere, Facebook’s fastest growth demographic is older users – the social network tacked on 12.4 million people between ages 35-49 in 2008 according to Nielsen.
See the full article at Mashable.
What Don Reisinger loves about MySpace Music
As someone who spends most of his day on the computer, I need to do everything I can to keep myself entertained. Sometimes, that manifests itself in games and other times I find entertainment on the Web through online music services.
For years, I used Pandora, the song discovery service powered by the Music Genome Project, and loved every minute of it. But over the past couple months, things have changed and I’ve quickly started to dedicate all my music time to MySpace Music.
The reasons why are numerous, but I should first note that I’ve got some issue with the service. First off, it’s inundated with ads, and no matter where you go, you can bet that any MySpace Music page will be flanked by blinking advertisements or other unwelcome additions that detract somewhat from an otherwise outstanding service.
I should also mention that MySpace Music doesn’t allow its users to share playlists, which is a bit annoying. You also can’t have it "on-the-go" nearly as easily as you can with a site like Pandora, which offers a mobile app for those who want to hear music while away from their computer.
Other than that, though, I simply love MySpace Music. It’s the single reason why my love affair with Pandora is over and it’s my first destination when I want to listen to music while I work. Simply put, it’s outstanding.
See the full article at Webware.
