WSJ reports NEGATIVE growth at Facebook and MySpace
The fickle user. It’s only complicated by the 17-24 year old “flash-in-the-pan” ship jumper. What’s hot todays always cools off. Such is the case with Facebook and MySpace.
Today, the Wall Street Journal offered a look into what’s happening with page views and new member sign-ups. With the world watching, there is a lot of pressure to continue the rapid growth. And as I’ve predicted, it just doesn’t seem like this younger audience wants to be part of this scene once it’s determined the sites are “the thing.”
“Both MySpace and Facebook lost visitors in September, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a Web-tracking service. The number of unique U.S. visitors at MySpace fell 4% to 47.2 million from 49.2 million in August, and the number of visitors to Facebook fell 12% to 7.8 million from 8.9 million.”
Meanwhile, there’s the internal vs. external number debate:
“Facebook spokeswoman Melanie Deitch says the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s own numbers show that the number of registered Facebook users rose 9% to 11 million in September, while the number of individual page views rose 40% to 16.5 billion.”
Facebook’s adding adults and other audiences was a mistake–well maybe not the high school students. Their new services have also been unpopular with their core audience. They should have stayed exclusively a college-student solution and tightened, not opened their service to new audiences.
Here’s to that BILLION dollar Yahoo! acquisition turning into into just hundreds of millions!
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