Mobile MySpace

Back in July I commented that US legislation to block social networking sites from schools and libraries (Yelvington) would simply pour funding into the mobile web since the kids who can't get onto MySpace from their school or library PC will work around it with the mobile web. The same day, by an amusing coincidence, News Corp appointed (Journalism.co.uk) its first head of mobile strategy; and today RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan tells us (Reuters) that "MySpace is internally developing a MySpace Web application to run on mobile phones that should be launched in three to four months with a major U.S. carrier". It can't really come as a surprise to anyone that MySpace and its young users are about to outflank the ponderous legislative efforts of the guys who think the Internet is made of tubes.

Also today, ForeverGeek attacks the "100 million MySpace users" myth, with a quick and dirty sample of 303 MySpace accounts showing that the number of active users may be under 50 million. Quite right - there's properly sampled data from Forrester (sub req'd) that shows a broadly similar pattern, where (in the UK) 5% of Internet users have started a blog and keep it updated but 6% have started a blog and abandoned it. Which interestingly, by simply applying those proportions of live and dead accounts to MySpace's 100 million, would give us 45 million active MySpace accounts - the same number arrived at by ForeverGeek, give or take 2 million. Not that 45 million active users is anything to sneeze at, of course. But while RBC Capital's valuation of MySpace at $15 billion (Reuters) has already been debunked by Peter Cashmore and Rafat, we can also now say that in terms of pure user numbers it is inflated by a factor of two and a bit. 

Comments

[Mr Wave Theory]

Forever Geek has a great post on how MySpace is really hyping its 100 million user number to the press. It's a great study. The study checked out 303 profiles and found that 50% of users don't even show up in a month. That's a very high attrition rate! I wonder what happened to those 50 million users?

Here's what I think are possible explanations:

* MySpace users have 2 accounts. Like free email accounts (think Hotmail and Yahoo), many people own more than one account - one for personal email and one for spam. So, if indeed, the average MySpace user has 2 accounts, then it makes sense that 50% of them won't show up after a month.

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