Week of June 22, 2009

Twittering in Canada

Friday, June 26, 2009

With all of the hype about Twitter over the last few months, this does not seem to have translated to activity in Canada. According to a study from Ipsos Reid, only 26% of Canadians who are online are aware of Twitter. And of those, only 6% have used it. That works out to just 1.45% of online Canadians who have used Twitter. Breaking it down by demos and location, the picture is more nuanced:

Worldwide, usage has shot up in the last few months, but, as we have pointed out recently, many of the new users don't stick around very long. So even if Canadian awareness of the service increases, usage may not spike upward.

More on MySpace's Troubles

Thursday, June 25, 2009

MySpace has suffered its share of bad news recently. In addition to being passed by Facebook for the first time in the US, MySpace laid off roughly 400 people, 30% of its staff. Sadly, there's nothing new in companies laying off employees, but some have speculated that MySpace might have to cut even further. According to the Business Insider <http://www.businessinsider.com/myspace-has-120-million-uniques-and-1000-employees-hi5-has-60-million-uniques-and-60-employees-2009-6> , Hi5, the #3 social networking site in the US, with half the monthly traffic of MySpace, has a staff of just 60 people. This compares with a (just reduced) staff of about 1000 for MySpace.

MySpace's Bad Week

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

MySpace was the subject of a number of negative stories in the last week, relating to dropping user stats and significant layoffs. One of the headlines was that Facebook finally surpassed MySpace in the US in terms of unique visitors (it had already done so worldwide last year).

User engagement, measured by a couple of basic metrics, is also way off for MySpace. While the time spent for each visit by Facebook users has remained steady over the past few months, in the 13-16 minute range, the time spent by MySpace users has fallen in half. Finally, the number of visit per month by MySpace users has been slowly dropping, while Facebook saw a spike in this number in late 2008.

Bad Week for MySpace

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

It's been a bad few days for MySpace. First, on June 15th, came the news that Facebook had finally surpassed MySpace in US web traffic in May. The next day, MySpace let go 30% of its staff, meaning that 400 staffer lost their jobs.

According to TechCrunch's analysis of ComScore data, May 2009 was the first time that Facebook passed MySpace in the US. Facebook squeaked out a win compared to its rival for the first time in the US, but Facebook had already passed MySpace worldwide in April of 2008. Here are there figures.

The disparity may continue to grow as reports indicate that Facebook has signed up millions of new users in the few days following the launch of its "Vanity URLs."

More on Twitter's Usage

Monday, June 22, 2009

Recently, we pointed out studies from the Harvard Business School and A.C. Nielsen that indicated that a large number of Twitter users join the service, then rarely if ever revisit the site. Now, more evidence of the same effect is coming to light. According to the web metrics site Compete, Twitter's traffic rose just 1.4% from April to May. Meanwhile, Quantcast, another website measuring firm, estimated that Twitter had 21.9 million unique visitors in May, down 6% from April.

Of course, slowing growth to a popular site is inevitable. But HubSpot released a detailed analysis of more than 4.5 million twitter accounts that showed how little activity many of these users have had on the site:

• 54.9 % have never tweeted
• 52.7% have no followers
• 55.5% were not following anyone else
• Only 24% have bothered to create a bio
• Just 31% least their location