MySpace To Go Supernova

There is something elegant about the theory that a digital entity, especially one based on networks and their associated dynamics, will obey, or at the very least, be susceptible to, the natural laws of science. Ergo, collapse under a dead weight, with nothing pressurising against external forces like costs, development and competition. In the case of Myspace, that “nothing” isn’t exactly true. There are still millions of accounts, the issue however is a growing percentage of dead profiles, not to mention the ever present issue of inaccurate account profile data that has made targeted advertising next to useless. As the ‘bounce rate’ indicates a site’s usefulness under certain search conditions, so the ‘echo rate’ predicates the social network’s usefulness and demise; a vast repository of accounts with no one home. A little preemptive? Well, that’s the point of social networks. They rise quickly, and collapse just as fast. This momentum affect of networks works to both its advantage and disadvantage. At the moment, the Myspace phenomenon is only sustained by lazy and unimaginative media buying groups. Once buyers run out of excuses in trying to explain the poor results of their $1m Myspace buy, the thing will commercially implode.

Curiously, the above estimates (source: Quantcast) of site traffic for Facebook (blue) and Myspace (green) suggest a type of zero-sum game, so that by April 2009 when the two networks crossed paths, they were set on on two divergent trajectories. The collapse of Myspace audience traffic (relatively speaking) is well documented, but what’s more interesting is the impending convergence of Facebook traffic growth with the steady decline in Yahoo.com site traffic (red). Based on this trend, the two sites are likely to converge around February 2010. Once ‘hit’ by the Facebook missile, is Yahoo.com likely follow the same downward spiral experienced by Myspace? There are clear differences in between two properties, but the one difference which clearly gave Yahoo its edge (i.e. 3x  the site traffic of Facebook) is no longer sustainable. But we digress. Right now, brands need to clear the planet because Myspace is about to go Supernova.