This WSJ piece seems to confirm what we suspect: MySpace fatigue is setting in, as users are increasingly put off by the “ever-growing cacophony of advertising and in some cases, spam”, the classical act of “how to lose friends and alienate people”.
Despite earlier hype, the guerrilla marketing is clearly driving away users. Has success spoiled MySpace? A byproduct of its popularity is the new generation of email spam that has cropped up in the form of mass friend requests to MySpace users as advertisers take advantage of the “friend request” function.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the number of unique U.S. visitors at MySpace fell 4% to 47.2 million from 49.2 million in August, and the number at Facebook fell 12% to 7.8 million from 8.9 million. Although both companies quick to point out the drop is “seasonal”, they concede that social networking is “moving from a growth spurt into a phase of maturity.”
The loss in unique visitors comes on top of several months of slower growth for both sites. Traffic to MySpace inched up 3.1% in the most recent three-month period ended in September, compared with a 45% jump in the same three-month period a year ago. Facebook’s traffic fell 1.7% in that period, compared with 11% growth a year ago.
However, advertisers and big Web players seem as enthusiastic as ever about social-networking sites. Google in August struck a deal with News Corp to deliver at least $900 million in ad revenue over three and half years in return for brokering advertising on MySpace. Microsoft also recently entered a similar agreement to be the exclusive provider of advertising to Facebook. Whether their strategies will pay off depends on the whims of those frequent social nets.