Wednesday, August 09, 2006

MySpace hits 100 million users

100 million seems to be a popular figure involving social-media sites lately. Last month YouTube announced they are serving up over 100 million videos a day, now MySpace has just topped the 100 million user mark.

This should give a nice media bump to the site that many think may be losing its 'coolness' factor, and ceding the role as 'the' hot social-media site to YouTube. In November of last year, MySpace had 40 million users. Five months later, in April of this year, they were up to 75 million users, adding 7 million per month. In the 4 months since April, MySpace has added another 25 million users, as the rate per month has fallen to 6.25 million a month.

Still, these figures are very impressive, and MySpace's deal to sign on Google as their official search engine will help. However, if MySpace continues to grow at their current rate, they will boast 150 million users by next April. An interesting question is, in 8 months, is it more likely that MySpace will have 150 million users, or less than they do today?

I vote the latter, the only thing harder than getting to the mountaintop (and staying relevant and hip with the kids), is staying there.

Pic via Foo Fighter's MySpace page

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm on your team, Mack. I think they'll have less, not just because of the coolness factor, but because of the usability.

I can't remember the last day that I didn't have problems with their site. There are constant login and loading problems, I swear they have a team of monkeys working on their programming.

Now, the pop-ups are coming more and more often, which means to me that they couldn't give a shit about their user.

The problem is that everyone is there, and it seems like a HUGE pain in the ass to pick up and move to another service.

Anyway, that's my rant. MySpace is just driving me nuts.

J.D. said...

I'm on the fence on that one. I don't think they'll have less, but I don't know if they'll climb to 150 mil.

Pros: It's the best way bar-none to connect with other people you know that have accounts. For example, if you're trying to catch up with an old high school or college buddy, you might be able to do it on your college's alumni site, but you wouldn't be able to use the same site to link up to your next-door neighbor who didn't go to your school.

Also, Myspace is a God-send to bloggers like me who need to get in touch with musicians and other celebs. At the current level of interactivity, this is a huge thing in Myspace's favor.

Cons: Musicians were enough. I don't know anyone who wants to add a movie profile to their friend list. Comedians were a nice tough though.

Myspace is constipated 99 percent of the time, because apparently it is running off of one badly damaged server that relies on a hamster spinning a wheel to keep it powered. For high-speed users the load times are unacceptably long.

These are the kind of things that, as Paul said, are like a steering wheel in my zipper (driving me nuts.)

But if they got rid of the clutter and streamlined the data flow so that load times and outages were non-existent, Myspace could be around for a long long time.

Anonymous said...

They crushed the 150 million mark in late January, currently at 158 million here in Febuary.