Facebook’s traffic equals Myspace
On June 6, 2007 I boldly predicted this would happen within a year, and now, here it is. Facebook and Myspace have the same amount of traffic according to Alexa! Myspace still exceeds Facebook in the U.S. specifically, but globally, they are identical, and the alexa’s reach number is poised to soon favor Facebook as well.
Facebook also reports 50 million active users, and over 36 Billion pageviews a month. Alexa similarly reports that each visitor averages 30/PVs/day on Facebook, with 10% of this now coming from apps pages. For completeness let me add, Compete.com reports much lower numbers for Facebook, showing myspace still very clearly ahead. I can’t compare methodologies here, but it seems to me that Comscore’s results more closely corroborate Alexa.
Some people say facebook is over hyped. In the dotcom bust, pageviews came from unsustainable advertising and excessive IPO funded burn rates. Facebook’s growth and usage is naturally viral and organic, and the company is profitable. Three weeks ago, I posted 7 ways that facebook is poised to exceed google in traffic, and only #6 has seen any activity so far, and that announcement on Nov 6th is likely to be bigger than I expected. We’ve seen leading companies regularly eclipsed by better newcomers, and that is likely to continue and even happen more quickly riding on social networks, so no one can predict whether FB will be relevant in 10 years, but the rising curve still has a long way to climb.
I now predict that FB will exceed two out of three of these by Jun 6, 2008: google.com, live.com and youtube.com. Google will be moving heavily into open social networking with an api launch next month, and youtube continues to grow reach very effectively. MSFT is shift msn.com traffic to live.com rapidly. Since this would make Facebook a global top 5 website, it would be non-trivial. More significant will be whether facebook exceeds the combined traffic of google/youtube/orkut or yahoo.com. It is clear they are working hard on the monetization of this traffic, in a way that doesn’t impact the user experience. myspace went with ad volume and visibility, and facebook is looking only to ad quality.
For me personally, the most exciting part of this is the tremendous explosion of creativity we will see with social network applications as widgets as the entire ecosystem competes on openness and features, for the hearts and passion of a million developers.
