A controversial article featuring research by Jupiter Research claimed active membership at MySpace was far below the number of registered users for the site.
Is MySpace popular? Lots of media sites think so. News Corp’s $580 million acquisition of the music and social networking website turned a lot of heads. With NBC Universal recently picking up the popular iVillage site for $600 million, some think Rupert Murdoch’s company over-spent for MySpace.
When we covered the initial report on MySpace possibly enhancing its popularity, the story generated a lot of feedback online. A couple of interesting comments found their way to the Murdok inbox.
The first comment came from no less a presence than News Corp itself. Fox Interactive Media president Ross Levinsohn emailed his thoughts on the assessment of MySpace made by Jupiter Research analyst Nate Elliot:
As President of the division overseeing My Space for News Corporation, I will tell you that Jupiter’s ascertain that My Space audience figures are inflated is nothing short of criminal. Call any of the official ratings services (Nielsen, comScore, Alexa) and you will see that Mr. Elliot’s comments are utterly false. My Space continues to be one of the fastest growing sites in the history of the Internet.
As far as Alexa is concerned, MySpace has the traffic. Page views for MySpace have generally increased over the past six months per Alexa’s data.
A few days after The MySpace Mirage hit the Web, a Cleveland-based Webmaster named Bryan Hance got in touch with me. He sacrificed a spare PC to a task aimed at verifying just whether or not a random sample of MySpace users was indeed going back to MySpace regularly or not.
Hance’s findings should make Levinsohn happier. Two days and 31,264 results later, Hance found that about 82 percent of his “nonscientific, and statistically about as strong as jello” sample was logging back in to MySpace within 5 days of their last login.
Elliot’s research claimed only 18 percent of his sample of registered social networking site users return to any networking site. Levinsohn’s group will have to convince advertisers that its membership is not a mirage, and can probably do so with some favorable analytics about MySpace.
82 percent or 18 percent? Does that add up for you? Leave a comment at SyndicationPro and let us know if this clears up the mirage.
—
Tag: | document.write(“Email Murdok here.”)
Drag this 
Add to document.write(“Del.icio.us”) | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
