News Corp’s MySpace Continues to Lead the Field

Despite Facebook’s impressive growth during the past twelve months, according to Nielsen, MySpace continues to overshadow the social networking competition in the US. In June MySpace had 59.7 million unique visitors as compared to 16.5 million for Facebook. News Corp.’s MySpace users increased by 14 million over the last year as compared to Facebook’s 8.6 million.

MySpace also dwarfs Facebook in terms of engagement, or time spent on the site. The average user in June was on MySpace for 158 minutes. Facebook’s users were on the site for an average of 68 minutes. MySpace also outpaced Facebook in terms of engagement growth rate: MySpace saw an engagement increase of 40% year-over-year whereas, Facebook only saw and increase of 24% over the same period.

Facebook’s decision in September to allow all web users (as opposed to being open only to users with a valid high school or college e-mail address) has paid off. Facebook’s growth has been greater among non-college-age users over the last year: 18 to 24 year olds have only grown 38%, 12 to 17 year olds have shot-up by 149%, 25 to 34 year olds have jumped by 181% and above 35 grew by 98%.