Facebook Increases Traffic, Losses Traction

According to a December 2008 report by comScore, Facebook, who had been trending upward as Blogger was trending flat, should have now surpassed Blogger for social media traffic. At the same time, Facebook fell behind SoMe competitor MySpace for actual user engagement. MySpace users spent an average of 90 minutes more on the site than did Facebook users. MySpace also continues to succeed in page views with 579 per user in January versus Facebook’s 337, the former showed a 10% increase in pages views compared to the later’s 3% increase.

How, one might ask, is this possible? Everyone knows that MySpae is for college dropouts and pedophiles and Facebook is for all of the beatiful smart people right? Actually, while Facebook may have begun as a SoNet for college students, it has quickly ecome populated with a varied audience, including non-college and business-minded types. Many of these are engaging withother social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter, dividing their attention. At the same time MySpace, which is most likely more attractive to users just now dipping their toes in social media, is seeing a less distracted crowd.

Any other theories on the shift?

See the numbers at TechCrunch.