Facebook Races Ahead Of MySpace

June 27th, 2008

The results of a worldwide survey, conducted by comScore, are out, and they show that for the first time ever, Facebook has raced ahead of MySpace, in the number of unique visitors both sites had in the month of May.

It actually began in April, when the two were running neck and neck, with Facebook having 116.4 million unique visitors and MySpace having 115.7 million. But in May, the difference was quite decisive with Facebook having 123.9 million visitors, and MySpace having 114.6 million visitors.

In terms of percentage, Facebook is 6% higher than its previous months figures, while MySpace has actually lost 1% of visitors. Year on year, Facebook has grown 162% from 47.2 million visitors last May, while MySpace has grown only 5%, from 109.5 million visitors last May.

Also the number of page views worldwide, was 50.7 billion for Facebook, and only 45.4 billion for MySpace.

However, there is hope for MySpace to pick up lost ground, as they have launched their redesigned site only a few days ago, which clients should find easier to use.

Facebook has also been talking about redesigning, but nothing has been done yet.

While these are worldwide figures, in the U.S., which remains the largest ad market, MySpace continues to lead, with a huge margin of 73.7 million unique visitors, against 35.6 million for Facebook. These figures for MySpace are 2% higher than in the previous month, while Facebook has shown no significant change between April and May, and will thus have to try hard to catch up with its biggest rival.

Worldwide figures of other social networks, for the month of May, show that they are nowhere near the top two, with Hi5 having 49.6 million, Friendster having 38.1 million, Orkut having 32.2 million and Bebo having 25.1 million unique visitors respectively.

Tags: facebook, myspace, social media marketing, social networks