MySpace Latest Teen Fad Site to Fade
 |
James Joyner | Sunday, October 29, 2006 |
WaPo fronts news that MySpace is going the way of Friendster and Xanga.
One key measure of a site’s popularity is the amount of time a user stays on the site. Tracked over time, such usage data for older networking sites frequented by young people show how popularity gradually rises then falls, like an inchworm’s back.
Take Xanga, the hot social networking site before MySpace: In October 2002, the typical Xanga user spent an average of 1 hour and 39 minutes a month on the site, a figure that declined steadily, reaching only 11 minutes last month, according to Nielsen-NetRatings. Friendster, another older site, hit its first usage peak of 1 hour and 51 minutes in October 2003, and then hit another peak of 3 hours and 3 minutes in February 2006. But last month, the average user was on Friendster for a mere 7 minutes.
MySpace usage ramped up heavily during its first year and a half, hitting 2 hours and 25 minutes in October last year. Then it dropped to about 2 hours and held relatively steady there for the past year. Facebook, a younger networking site, is still on a gradual incline, reaching 1 hour and 9 minutes last month .
It’s hard to make an online audience stick. Most Internet services are free and compete for a viewer’s time, which most sites then try to parlay into advertising dollars. The more time someone spends on a site, the more ads they see. The successful sites engender habits among their users, but users can — and historically have — defected to other services for any number of reasons.
The high school English class cites several reasons for backing off of MySpace: Creepy people proposition them. Teachers and parents monitor them. New, more alluring free services comes along, so they collectively jump ship.
The relatively short lifecycle of a popular site is a terrifying prospect for companies like Google Inc., which this month spent $1.65 billion in stock to acquire the Internet’s latest grass-roots favorite, year-old YouTube, whose popularity Google hopes to harness as a loyal video audience.
My guess is that another reason these sites fade away is that, much like teen slang, once grown-ups pick up on them, they lose their “cool” factor. Once words like “bling” and “phat” make it into mainstream usage, even as shtick, they lose their edge appeal. Ditto grandma having her own MySpace site.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
Follow James on FriendFeed | Twitter | Digg
- None Found
- Caption Contest Winners
- OTB Latenight – Styx
- Berlin Wall Fall: 20 Years Later
- Oklahoma High Schoolers Are Very Familiar With George Washington, Thanks
- Was Fort Hood Massacre ‘Terrorism’?
- Making Jobs More Expensive
- House Trades Freedom for Health Coverage, Senate’s Move
- Hasan a Muslim First, American Second?
- OTB Caption JamTM
- Taking “No” As Iran’s Answer
I think youtube has a better chance of holding its appeal given the constantly updated content. The problem I see is coming up with a business model that pays for the video bandwidth that doesn't involve pay for porn.
MySpace can't go away soon enough. If I never again see an animated non-scrolling background, <blink> text, and videos and audio that simultaneously autoplay... it'll be too soon.
If MySpace went away, where would all the marketers and deviants go? ;)
I opened up a MySpace account just to find out what it was like. The results were pretty funny, at least for someone without teens - so much so that I posted the results on my silly, work appropriate, humor blog (Say No to Crack).
where would all the marketers and deviants go? ;)
Down with that - I opened an account to get messages from my friends band on appearances and then I got about a million porn spam messages from 'girls who want to meet you'
Comments are Closed
