• The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Thursday, October 26, 2006 11:45 AM

Both MySpace and Facebook, the Web's largest social networks, lost traffic in September, according to data from Web measurement service Nielsen//NetRatings. The total number of unique visitors to MySpace fell 4% to 47.2 million from 49.2 million in August--while Facebook's traffic fell three times harder to 7.8 million from 8.9 million, or 12%.

Nielsen analyst Charles Buchwalter attributes the slowdown in traffic to seasonality, saying both sites lost visitors as students went back to school last year. Isn't Facebook supposed to be for students?

Facebook countered by claiming that the total number of registered users rose 9%, and that individual page views actually rose 40% in the same period. MySpace, on the other hand, admitted a slowdown.

Are kids getting sick of MySpace and Facebook? It may be way too soon to say. It would be more troublesome if the rate of member deletions were rising--something MySpace flatly denies.

But there is a spam problem on MySpace that's beginning to annoy some users. Some advertisers are taking advantage of the "friend request" function to send out automated, mass unsolicited notices to users. Many of these friend solicitations bring users to porn sites looking to add new members. Several users have killed their profiles in response. On Facebook, some users are defecting because the site decided to open its doors to anyone.

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