• ABC News, Friday, February 24, 2006 10:17 AM

Jupiter Research analyst Nate Elliot says MySpace's actual usage numbers are grossly inflated. While a large number of people do spend a lot of time on the site, Elliot says "the huge numbers they throw out there--50 [million], 60 million registered users--those are a mirage." Not because the social networking site doesn't actually have that many registered users, rather, they only tell part of the story. "Only a fraction of [the registered users] use the site on any kind of regular basis, and then another fraction of them are responsible for the traffic," he says. In a recent survey (ostensibly by Jupiter Research although the article is unclear about this) 12 percent of Internet users in the United States said they're registered at an online networking site. Of those, one in five report visiting such sites more often than once a week. All this adds up to a very small fraction of the 60 million or so MySpace users who regularly use the site. Elliot predicts MySpace will start losing its cool factor fast, in part due to the constant media attention it receives. "Once you start showing up in Newsweek, and one of the largest media companies in the world pays a half billion dollars for you, it's kind of hard to maintain that 'street cred,'" he says.

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