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MySpace #1 US Destination Last Week
An anonymous reader writes "Hitwise is reporting that MySpace has reached the top, surpassing Yahoo! Mail as the most visited site on the internet for US users. Seeing a 4300% increase in visits in just two short years, this internet sensation has come quite a long ways. From the article: 'To put MySpace's growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits.'"
How can we learn from this to make our sites better. Can we translate this type of activity to the 30+ crowd instead of just the teens?
How do you obtain their numbers? Are they using DNS? Are they putting sniffers on all the core routers? Is this even possible to any degree of accuracy? It seems this junk science is probably about as reliable as Neilsen ratings...
MySpace is well designed, you just can't see the forest for the trees.
Firstly, go read this article which talks about what geeks call "marketing", which is often used as a throwaway term for all the parts of running a software business that the programmers don't really understand or care about. MySpace has not done any serious marketing. It grew entirely through word of mouth.
Next, go actually look at MySpace, and do it through the eyes of a non-technical young person. I don't mean a 16 year old, though I'm sure there are lots there, I mean anybody under 35. MySpace offers the following things:
It's distracting and fun. It has lots of features that let people spend their time just faffing around - redesigning their profile yet again, finding cool bands, seeing who their friends friends are, writing on peoples walls etc. If there's nothing good on TV and they don't have much energy it's an easy way to be entertained.
It lets people express themselves. Ever wondered why almost every MySpace profile page is customised? Well, people just love to express themselves. How many people live in a room with no ornaments or posters or personal artifacts? Hardly anybody right? Why do people blow 8mb of memory on a wallpaper that will sit under their copy of Word for 90% of the day? Why do people use annoying custom ringtones that they change every few weeks? People like to customise their personal space, it's just a part of who we are, and MySpace allows you to do that.
It's a quick and easy way for musicians to get their music out to the masses. See the example of Lily Allen in the UK for somebody who made it big via MySpace. Ditto for I think the Arctic Monkeys.
It can be used as a dating site even though it's not marketed that way.
It used to be that people met through local institutions ... if you go back and ask your grandmother how she met your grandfather I wouldn't be surprised to hear an answer like "we went to the same church" or "he worked in a local shop and I saw him every day when buying groceries". This sort of thing is now very uncommon. People live more isolated lives, and it's often hard to date people you meet through work due to workplace politics - this is especially true of slightly older types who are in management.
So it's not surprising that surveys and studies everywhere show that use of internet dating is way, way up and growing all the time. But it still has some social stigma attached to it. MySpace lets you search peoples profiles by region and easily contact them, which is all you really need to have a "dating site", except anybody who is on there can simply say they are there because their friends are there, because they like the bands etc. And for people looking it's better too, as people tend to post (mostly) real photos and don't just make stuff up, because they know their friends might see it.
It has lots and lots and lots of people
Some things MySpace doesn't have: technical sophistication, robustness, speed - all the things geeks value. These things do matter, look at how totally Facebook has crushed MySpace amongst those who have access to it. But never discount the value of a good social design, because these sites aren't tech demos, they are social networking sites.