Research from Nielsen shows that time spent on Facebook is up 700% from a year ago (that’s April ’08 to April ’09). Meanwhile, MySpace has experienced -31% year-over-year growth.
That doesn’t look great for MySpace, but don’t count out the still popular social network. MySpace is still beating Facebook when it comes to video. In April, Myspace visitors spent 384 million minutes watching video (an average of 38.8 minutes per viewer), while Facebook visitors spent only 113.5 million minutes watching video (an average of 11.2 minutes per video viewer).
“We have seen some very exciting growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace. Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space. The one thing that is clear about social networking is that regardless of how fast a site is growing, or a how big it is, it can quickly fall out of favor with consumers,” said Jon Gibs, vice president, media and agency insights, Nielsen Online. “Remember Friendster? Remember when MySpace was an unbeatable force? Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune. Consumers have shown that they are willing to pick up their networks and move them to another platform, seemingly at a moment’s notice.”
Gibs makes a very valid point. Look at the backlash that Facebook got from its users after it implemented the infamous redesign. Granted, the redesign is still in effect, and the site is still growing, but if something else comes along that people like better, you never know what can happen. In fact, this is why I find Google’s rise as a social network all the more intriguing.
But for now, Facebooks is obviously the dominant force to be reckoned with. It does have a problem with user retention from the over-55 crowd. Justin Smith suggests the following four reasons for this:
1. Facebook currently provides less value to this age group because most of their friends are still using other communication tools like email.
2. The real-time Facebook stream is too new and overwhelming for people less familiar with social networks to understand.
3. Seasonality of family communication.
4. Facebook was just a one-time thing.
Smith goes into detail to back up each of these reasons in an interesting post here. He also looks at audience growth in the last two 60-day periods, providing the following graph:
As you can see there has been substantial growth among the college age crowd. A while back, a study was released, indicating that Facebook was actually having a negative impact on the grades of students. The study looked at Ohio State University specifically.
The Wall Street journal is showing a little more to this story now, citing newer studies that actually show Facebook use as being more common with students who get higher grades. Like anything else, it’s how you use it, and not if you use it.
What do you make of the Facebook growth data? How about Facebook’s correlation with grades? Talk about it.
