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MySpace Loses Ten Million Users In One Month
Goldiloxx writes "Social networking website MySpace lost over ten million users between January and February 2011, according to comScore. In February 2011, the Internet website had less than 63 million users, down from a previous total of approximately 73 million."
MySpace has no change in surviving anymore. Facebook has 600+ million users and Windows Live Messenger has 330+ million users. The only larger network than those two is interestingly Chinese QQ, which has 636 million users.
MySpace's Chief Executive Officer Michael Jones has claimed that the website is "no longer a social network anymore" and that it is currently a "social entertainment destination".
Allow me to translate: "Our business model is screwed, because someone else did it much better, so we're desperately trying to rebrand ourself as something else"
It's in people's nature to never give up, keep trying to the bitter end, but this is a sinking ship that cannot be saved.
MySpace is destined to go the way of Geocities, Livejournal, etc. The latter is still hanging on by a thread, the former was devoured by Yahoo! who then killed it. And yes, Twitter is about to follow suit. Facebook I'm not so sure will suffer the same fate. The partnership with Zynga and its addictive games means that it will have users for years who would have otherwise dumped the site for greener pastures. The only danger is when/if Zynga abandons Facebook to strike out on its own, allowing access via apps from mobile devices directly. That will be FB's downfall.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I doubt they actually lost 10 million users, probably just a few thousand 50-year-old men *pretending* to be 10 million teenage girls.
i knew I forgot something....
bah.
so printing my myspace address on the back of a CD like I did 3 years ago was a bad idea?
crap
www.myspace.com/russbro - say hello to www.facebook.com/russbrownmusic
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
anyone remember friendster?
it's my belief that social networks will rise and fall, endlessly in succession. simply because ubiquity eventually becomes a liability amongst a crowd who views exclusion and superiority to be more important. eventually, one of these smaller exclusive networks becomes the object of envy for others to be "in" that exclusive group, and the long march to ubiquity begins, until you start all over again
its an empty vapid game. its also pretty much boilerplate sociological fact. consider nightclubs in cities: the small chic "in" club that everyone wants to get into, overexposure, then decline because the "cool" kids want their own exclusive club. rinse, repeat
and no, facebook will not become ubiquitous plumbing. because they need to make money to survive. to make that money, they need to sell the personal details of their members. which is a force that will drive people from facebook as they wise up to how creepy that really is: by feeding their personal details to the machine, they are telling their abuser how to abuse them
so be on the lookout for the next friendster/ myspace/ facebook. could be diaspora. or maybe being programmed right now in some dorm room. $$$ to the chaps who start/ find the right network at the right time, and ride that rocket all the way up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
>Thank goodness he bet on the wrong social network.
MySpace is what you get when Rupert Murdoch tries to be hip. He should stick to scaring old people and giving them sound bite answers to complex problems, it's what he does best.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
As if it could get any worse, now their name has underscores in it.
The next and 'final' social network will be an open source peer-to-peer network with commercial caching and hosting; if my plan works.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
But my life coach said if I think hard enough it'll come true!
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Does that include users who have abandoned the service?
I have a myspace account. I don't think I've updated it in 5 years.
Awesome news. I wish it had more to do with people actively looking at boycotting News Corp.
I've been working on a firefox extension to help people boycott News Corp, NBC and others: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webcott/
Also looking at alternatives to myspace here: http://bryanquigley.com/webcott/leave-myspace-for-wordpress-com
You were actually able to view a MySpace page for long enough to want to rip your eyes out? I'm impressed. Back when MySpace was popular, most of those pages would crash my web browser long before I actually got to look at them.
Interesting coincidence that the Rustock Botnet spam network was taken down and MySpace loses 10 Million accounts? I know these two events can't be connected to each other, right?
This is true, but at the time he bought MySpace, it was worth a lot more than Facebook was. Which is why he bought it. He thought he was going to rule with MySpace and Facebook would remain smaller forever.
you're talking about a social network protocol, like http, smtp, nntp, etc
the point is, we'd have many different internets today if it was started as different walled gardens you had to pay for. well, actually, that is the way it was: bbses, compuserve, etc. all of which died in favor of the free and the open
so end game for friendster/ myspace/ facebook is a free and open social network protocol. sntp sounds too confusingly like smtp so lets call it...
vytp
vapid yammering transfer protocol
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The news is that you can actually cancel your account! Now, if I could just remember my password...
Ebay and Facebook are different beasts, but Facebook can remain the top social networking site while still being in decline. Maybe it's because I think Facebook's appeal is in part due to its relative newness.
"Hey, I can post my thoughts in one place and all these people will see them!"
"Hey, I haven't talked to her in years and now I can find out what's going on in her daily life without picking up the phone."
After awhile you realize that getting the 1 page update in the Xmas card each year is more than enough.
Bakersfield has no chance of surviving.
Now there's a relief.
eBay seems like a natural monopoly to me. When you auction something, you have to pick one site. You can't auction the same item at multiple auction sites. Since everybody has to pick one, they pick what they think is the best one. For an auction "best" is closely tied to "popular" since exposure is important. Once a clear winner emerged, it was all she wrote.
Frankly, I'm surprised that eBay/paypal gets away with this monopoly. It definitely keeps me away. I'd like to see them forced to use competing payment services in particular.
Anyway, I digress. You could cross-post all your stupid updates and baby pictures to multiple sites and it wouldn't matter.
FaceBook's lock-in is switching cost. It's a lower barrier. If you're a teenager and you haven't really put anything important on FB then switching is easy. If you've put someting embarassing on FB then switching might also be desireable. You just start telling people, "Oh, I'm on the hip new NewBook" and hope they don't go looking for your old FB account.
Before FB started waging war on anonymity, a lot of people had disposable IDs. That's a market that FB can't serve.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
scaring old people and giving them sound bite answers to complex problems
Isn't that the business model of myspace / facebook / twitter?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
That's basically what Facebook did to MySpace. It improved on social networking beyond what MySpace offered because it was more personalized and less childish (using real names and not allowing horrible page layouts, for starters. Facebook also didn't stop loading pages within every five internal links like MySpace often did). Facebook also monetizes more intelligently and less intrusively, aiming ads at users who may be interested in seeing them using a small box on the side panel rather than Flash popups on music players and whatever else MySpace did.
Needless to say, I think that Facebook is going to be around for some time. They've known what they're doing since they started.
I'm not surprised they are losing this many users. Rather than stagnating and becoming irrelevant like Geocities and Livejournal, MySpace is actively alienating it's userbase.
They saw that people were moving to other platforms, and decided to engage in a poorly thought out redesign that took the features people actually used, and removed, broke, or hid them.
I haven't deleted my MySpace accounts, but as a musician until recently did have a worthwhile reason for logging in periodically to keep in touch with venues and other bands, and as a URL I could give out to showcase recordings and show dates. All that functionality is fubed now, as is the layout and design of my page.
I won't be back.
When I cancelled my account, I noticed a few interesting things:
1. My list of friends was significantly reduced from what it had been in the past, making me think that they cancelled their accounts.
2. Myspace is completely different looking than it was however long ago I last logged in. You wouldn't even recognize it now. Apparently when they redid the look, they wiped out any customized backgrounds that were set.
3. For some reason, myspace decided that I am following Justin Bieber, Russell Crowe, Tom Petty, and a whole slew of other celebrities, most of which I have never heard of. The entire content of my 'home' screen is a bunch of updates from bands and actors that I have no interest in.
4. None of my remaining friends have posted a comment in over a year.
5. I apparently 'earned' a 'badge' for joining myspace 'before it was cool'. I'm pretty sure I was a late adopter.
6. You can cancel your account, but it is a separate step process that involves you responding to a confirmation email. Perhaps that is reasonable. They grovel for you to stay at several points in the process.
MySpace was the GeoCities of social media sites. Every page had horrific backgrounds and thousands of animated GIFs and there was crap blinking everywhere.
I'm surprised that a good percentage of MySpace users didn't die from epileptic seizures induced by all that flashing.
Your argument in defense of eBay works for Facebook as well though. Another auction site can't gain traction because eBay has a user base and is well known? Well same with Facebook. Users won't start suddenly using iAuctionSite just like they won't start suddenly using Face-whatever. For another company to break into the market, they will have to convince users to switch and users won't switch unless their personal threshold of other users who have already switched is met. What is an auction site with no auctions and buyers? And what is a social networking site with no people? It can be done, but it is much harder than just stealing people away from a brand.
Facebook knows that a million social networking sites exist for specific topics. They created an API so that these sites can piggyback off of Facebook rather than compete. A small company that doesn't want to compete with Facebook wins because they are more likely to get registered users. Larger sites are sort of forced into integrating with Facebook because it is expected of them. Ones that aren't in direct competition like it too for marketing. A site in direct competition with Facebook can add it to the list of problems they are already facing by attempting to exist.
Facebook just rolled out commenting inline with a blog or website. Now, comments are going to start being Facebook centric more and more, even if you aren't on Facebook. They use meta tags now that allow someone to have their webpage recognized as a Facebook searchable entity (Open Graph protocol). Facebook's hooks are deep because they have a userbase and are embedded throughout the web. Logins rely on them, social media relies on them, commenting systems are starting to rely on them.
Myspace was unlucky because they found themselves as a big player in the start of an important game. Unfortunately, coming into it completely new left them with something unsustainable: an immature implementation of social networking that only went as far as the website itself.
Myspace is like Altavista, Excite, AskJeeves and/or Yahoo. They all were big names in the emerging search engine market and everyone tech-saavy or with a computer in the 90s heard of them. They had great ideas and really opened up an entire world that is still important. However Google came along and did everything right. They all (or most) still exist in some form I believe but it's like Myspace is now. These were huge companies at one point. They aren't going to collapse in on themselves the same way as smaller companies, but they aren't relevant. Google and Facebook meanwhile aren't showing signs of stopping and a collapse would affect things much much more than just a website going down, at this point, due to the massive amount of integration.
Agreed. MySpace was in a great position to become THE indy music network, but they failed to realise that opportunity and went through with a massive redesign that alienated all those users.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Who knew there were that many 14 year old Emo chicks?
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Apparently when they redid the look, they wiped out any customized backgrounds that were set.
And that's a bad thing???!!!!
As far as I'm concerned, MySpaces eye-gougingly fugly "customized backgrounds" should have been nuked from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
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