Facebook Hockey Sticks, MySpace Languishes

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Michael Arrington

TechCrunch.com
Monday, March 23, 2009; 4:41 PM

What was a bad situation in November 2008 is starting to turn outright ugly - Facebook is now well over twice the size of MySpace, according to recent worldwide Comscore data. And what's worse, MySpace is losing audience while Facebook absolutely hockey sticks: MySpace lost 2% of users in just one month, while Facebook grew by nearly 40 million members in February alone. MySpace currently has 124 million monthly unique visitors, compared to Facebook's 276 million.

That's a 16.6% growth rate at Facebook in one month. This simply doesn't happen with sites that already have hundreds of millions of users. It was less than a year ago that MySpace and Facebook were the same size.

Comscore says more than 1 in 4 people with Internet access visited Facebook last month. They're sixth overall in terms of top sites in terms of unique users, and third (after Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) in overall page views.

MySpace continues to see executive departures, and it isn't clear that founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson will be staying on after their contracts terminate later this year. We expect more defections by the summer, and a possible reorganization of parent entity Fox Interactive Media.