Is MySpace just a flavour of the month?

Yuki Noguchi writes in the Wash Post that In Teens' Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year.

More opinion than fact, but still worth a read. For now, however, a ton of people are still using MySpace and FIM's $585M investment has proven to be incredibly smart, especially given the recent $900M ad deal with Google. Fake friends, an overload of spam and a horrible user interface could change that if FIM doesn't react and not just ride the wave.

Noguchi writes that "one key measure of a site's popularity is the amount of time a user stays on the site" and points to a decline in that metric to cast doubt on MySpace's business. I hate to disagree, but time on site is a pathetic way to measure usage or success online.

Sorry Yuki, but talking about stickiness isn't even "so last year"... it is so 2001.

On MySpace, the poor quality of the UI actually creates bogus clicks and forces extra pages on people. That, in turn, generates extra time on site. As people get used to the horrible interface, they might learn how to get around some of the problems and thus need to spend less time on site. Also, to their credit, FIM has made a few changes, and it has improved the navigation and structure of the site. That, too, could lower time on site.

The bigger point, however, is that time on site means nothing, when compared to the number of visits, members and interaction. Oh, and then there are metrics like revenue and ROI, but why should we worry about those, right? The difference today is that businesses care less about stickiness and more about the bottom line, and that's a good thing.

Mathew Ingram has posted some good commentary as well as a bunch of links to others discussing the issue. And for a blast from the past, check out Scott Karp's post on the subject earlier this year when he wrote that he has "no interest in declaring MySpace “dead” — just deeply, deeply vulnerable."


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