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A Bleak Outlook for MySpace

It looks as though MySpace's last stronghold in social networking is about to fall, as Facebook creeps up on its No. 1 position in the U.S., says TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. Only one year ago it seemed that Facebook would need more than four years to catch up to MySpace in the U.S., but today that has changed, as Facebook has surged to 61 million unique users compared to MySpace's 70 million.

Losing the U.S. user war is certainly a big problem, but Arrington says an even bigger concern for the News Corp. company is the rate at which page views are declining. This means that while people are still visiting the site, they are going less and spending less time there than they used to. Stalled growth and fewer page views means fewer advertising impressions, which means less money for MySpace. According to comScore, MySpace page views have declined from 47.4 billion in April 2008 to 38 billion today, or -20%. In that same period, Facebook has grown from 44 billion to 87 billion-close to a 100% increase.

And it just gets worse, says Arrington: "In about a year from now MySpace will receive their last welfare payment from Google, and they'll be on their own. They'll have a social network that costs half a billion dollars a year to run. With page views decreasing and the Google money gone there is a strong likelihood that the News Corp. subsidiary will be unprofitable a year from now."

Read the whole story at TechCrunch »

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