Put My Money on Myspace not Facebook

Ahh… welcome back to the Myspace and Facebook debate. I love talking about the business models of social networks across the Internet.

I was reading a post from Edmund Lee at theBigMoney called Why Facebook Can’t Succeed (via alisa at socialized) and I found myself agreeing with Edmund on some of the community versus business aspects of his post. I have always been under the assumption that we were approaching another net explosion (circa 1999) because of the value of companies being placed on growth instead of revenue. It seems ridiculous to me and completely backward.

It is easy for the social media nerds of the world to bash the social networks (Myspace) that tend to be a little more “whoring” of their advertising. The truth of the matter is that users of Myspace tend to spend more time on the site compared to Facebook.

“According to comScore Media Metrix, MySpace users spend an average of 234 minutes on the site each month, as opposed to Facebook’s 169 minute per user average. Furthermore, MySpace has a bigger cut of the U.S. audience, the most lucrative, at 75 million unique visitors for January, outpacing Facebook’s 57 million.” (Edmund Lee via comScore)

I might not be using Myspace as an individual but we cannot ignore the fact that they focus more on profitability than user growth. There is something to say about Myspace still appealing to users and the overall revenue growth of the company. Facebook may have a faster growth trend than Myspace but Myspace is the smarter social network of the two. The users are still hitting the site and using the tool…that is what matters to the growth of business in social media.

We are all still waiting for the brains of Facebook to present a viable revenue model for the site (Lexicon?) but until that time… I would invest in Myspace over Facebook.. any day of the week.

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