On Tuesday we gave you the top 15 trending brands on Twitter in 2011 according to HootSuite. Not too many surprises emerged from it, other than Myspace which attained a rather lofty seventh place.
This data has now been given further credence as Hypebot reports, with comScore’s latest figures showing that Myspace notches up more unique visitors each month than both Tumblr and Google+.
Launched in 2003, Myspace was once one of the biggest social networks on the Web, but has been in steady decline for the past four years. Bought in 2005 for US$580 million by News Corporation (owned by Rupert Murdoch), the 100 millionth MySpace account was created in 2006. It then joined other popular social networks at the time, which included Bebo, Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Ning, in the Google-directed OpenSocial alliance, an initiative to promote common standards for software developers programming for social networks. Facebook, however, didn’t join.
At its peak, Myspace was valued at $12 billion, but as of last year it was reportedly losing 10m members a month. So whilst it’s still ahead in the social networking game compared to some of its cooler peers, it’s still likely heading in a downwards trajectory. It will be interesting to see if it’s still garnering such high traffic this time next year, with Google expected to ramp its social network up a few notches in 2012.
That said, Myspace is a fighter. At CES in Las Vegas this week, it emerged that Myspace TV is in the works, an initiative with Panasonic that will see an app bring together social networking and user-generated content. Myspace, the brand, could live on for some time yet.
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