Facebook Got 10 Million More US Visitors Than MySpace in January, Officially the Largest Social Network

I just love the days when the web analytics service Compete makes its data for the previous month available to all of us as we get the chance to look into statistics of various websites we like to track for some reason and see how they are doing compared to their competitors. Since Compete is known to be one of the most accurate sources of publicly available information on US visitors to various websites, it makes the entire process even more exciting.

So when I got my precious notification that January data is available I rushed to Compete to see how some of the most interesting projects were doing. There were some interesting things - like the fact that Twitter growth for the year amounted to impressive 812.7%. And while this figure is mere nothing compared to FriendFeed’s 3327.6%, it is still very impressive as Twitter has reached almost 6 million monthly visitors from the US (where FriendFeed still had less than a million). In fact, this makes Twitter equal to almost one tenth of Facebook which is more than impressive given that Twitter is basically the status update feature of Facebook only and status update is definitely less than one tenth of the entire Facebook functionality (even though it is difficult to evaluate).

But the real intrigue is in the fact that the much-discussed fight for the role of the most popular social network in the world now seems to be finally over as Facebook has certainly left MySpace far behind. Those of you who watch the entire social networking scene more or less closely are aware of the fact that Facebook has been the number one social network in the world for quite a while now but MySpace still maintained its leading position in one country, the US. And US is the most important country when it comes to evaluating the value of a social network - after all, US users tend to generate revenue unlike users from many other countries who you can never sell to potential advertisers.

I’ve been watching how the situation evolved with MySpace and Facebook fighting for the top position in the US for a few months now. Over the last few months Facebook has been growing steadily (though not really rapidly) while MySpace has been slowly losing visitors. Since last January MySpace has had its traffic diminish by 5.3% while Facebook has grown by 125.6% over the same time period. As a result back in December the two networks got very similar traffic numbers.

And the situation only got worse for MySpace in January: where MySpace received 58,556 thousand visitors Facebook got 68,558 thousand - a whole 10 million gap between the two of them. This is even more impressive given the fact that they were very close only one month ago.

I think it is pretty clear already that the fight must have already ended and Facebook is clearly the winner in this game. It is pretty hard to predict for how long this leadership will last but for now there are no signs of MySpace preparing some revolutionary or extraordinary measures that could push it back to leadership. And with continued decline for MySpace and growth for Facebook the situation will only get worse for MySpace.