Facebook passed MySpace in worldwide traffic a while ago, but MySpace has kept dominating the US market. Well, it looks like that is about to change really soon.
Within a month (or two at the most), if the current trend holds, Facebook will have more daily visitors than MySpace in the US according to Google Trends for Websites.
From where is Facebook getting its users?
It doesn’t look like MySpace is losing that much traffic, so it’s unlikely that its users are just jumping ship. Judging by the graph above, MySpace has remained more or less on the same level in the US for over a year while Facebook has kept growing steadily. And now they are finally about to catch up.
So, if MySpace traffic isn’t decreasing, from where is Facebook getting its users? As far as we here at Pingdom can tell based on our experience, there are four possibilities:
- MySpace users sign up on Facebook but keep using MySpace, i.e. they become simultaneous users of both MySpace and Facebook.
- Facebook is taking users away from MySpace, but at the same rate that MySpace is recruiting new users (which is why MySpace is neither gaining nor losing traffic overall).
- Facebook is getting its users from other communities than MySpace.
- Facebook is attracting completely new social network users, not taking them from other communities.
Of course these four points are all extremes and the truth is bound to be a combination of all four (and perhaps other options we didn’t consider), but it would be interesting to know which one is the most common.
Facebook has more than doubled its worldwide traffic in a year
From the look of it, worldwide traffic to Facebook has more than doubled in the last year, and that growth doesn’t seem to be slowing down at all:
What’s the key to Facebook’s growth spurt?
What do you think is the key (or keys) to Facebook’s rapid growth, both internationally and in the US?
And from where are those users coming? How are you and your friends using these communities?
Share your thoughts with us in the comments!
