From a Wired Magazine on myspace.com:
By any measure, MySpace is one of the top sites on the Web. It racked up 9.4 billion pageviews in August – more than Google – and new users are signing up at a stunning rate of 3.5 million a month. But these aren’t the only numbers that drew the attention of Rupert Murdoch, chair and CEO of News Corp., which agreed to buy MySpace’s parent company in July for $580 million: The site hosts 12 percent of all ads on the Web, more than any other site. MySpace should gross $30 million to $40 million this year, says John Tinker, an analyst with ThinkEquity in New York. And with News Corp.’s sales force behind it, he estimates the company could double that figure in 2006.
I don’t doubt the financial numbers, as they can be verified and they were probably audited prior to purchase, but in no way do I accept that they get more traffic than Google. Also, at 3.5m new users per month, they would have quickly exhaused the population of who would probably visit a site like this on a regular basis in a year.
Furthermore, I know a lot of people into music and deal on a regular basis with college and high school kids. No one has ever mentioned this site before. Even if they are visiting it, I’d think if it were this big you’d hear some sort of buzz about it.
Something is inflating the numbers here. They claim there are 400,000 bands registered on the site. Assuming a band with 4 people, that’s 1.6m people in garage bands, or about 1% of the population. Considering the median age in the US is in the 30’s I really doubt that this much of the population a) are in garage bands, and b) have a band website on myspace.com.
I have no doubt its a popular site and probably even a really big site, but bigger than google??? There has to be some sort of inflated number from the same people hitting forum pages over and over.
Moreover, if they are doing 9.4b page views in a month, and to be conservative we assume they have no growth over a 12 month period, that’s 112.8b page views per year. They expect to gross $30-40m this year. Giving them the benefit of the doubt that they make $40m, and assuming 100% of revenue comes from advertising, that gives them 2,820 page vies per $1 of revenue, or a CPM of about $0.35. This is giving them all the benefits of the doubt. Drop the revenue numbers a bit, assume less than 100% of revenue is from ads, and assume that the page view growth continues, you are looking a CPM in the range of $0.25-0.10.
Oh, and that’s assuming 1 ad per page, which they don’t do. On the front page I count 4 ads, 2 of which are text ads. If they are serving up 12% of the ads on the internet, it is because they are giving the ads away.
They claim to be like Craigslist. Check out their classified ads for your city and compare it to Craingslist. They claim to be like friendster. How many people do you know on myspace compared to friendster??
Something is really fishy or I am really out of touch with what is happening on the Internet.
2 replies on “I call bullshit”
I’m not saying you aren’t right to be suspicious, but more than Google make some sense. I hit Google probably, on average, 3 times per day, and I am a pretty heavy Google user. The MySpace demographic seems to be mostly high school, on average. Those folks have time on their hands, and they hang out — they go from page to page to page during a “visit” to MySpace, whereas a “visit” to Google involves hitting the search and usually clicking off from Google on the first page. So, the page view volume is more about the kids-have-time factor combined with the hang-out factor.
MySpace, getting more visits than google, doesn’t suprise me AT ALL. My debaters LIVE on MySpace. During practice, since everyone has laptops and wireless exists in our office, I would bet at any given moment over 50% are on MySpace. When I get in a “myspace” mood, I bet I read the profiles of 15-20 people. MySpace is way more popular than Friendster ever was… easily. Unlike Friendster, MySpace is built on, and subscribed to, by kids who didn’t have to alter any “normal” activity – that is they only know a world where life is spent on AIM, Email, Bulletin Boards, etc. MySpace combines all of those things.
Also, MySpace is getting some pretty major bands on it – putting music up, etc.
None of those statistics suprise me. Incidentally, the CEO of MySpace, prior to it being purchased by FoxNews, (he might still be the CEO), is someone who was a founding writer for Victory Briefs.