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Wanna bet? In 1 year, will Facebook be bigger? Or will MySpace?

vs.

The bet: Which social network will be bigger?
Oh this will be fun ;-) My friend Arjun (ex-Amazon, currently at Zillow) and I had the following conversation when we were talking about widget development:

Andrew: why not be more excited about the myspace integration possibilities? that’s like a 5X bigger ecoysystem

Arjun: yuck.

Andrew: ??

Arjun: myspace already has too many issues
their UI is so cluttered that it would be impossible

Andrew: i think you might just be techno-elitist

Arjun: facebook is already getting cluttered

Andrew: which biases your business calculations

Arjun: yeah, that’s probably true..

Andrew: i mean, are you separating your business evaluation and your personal evaluation?

Arjun: but myspace is dead, man.

Andrew: thats so wrong lol
myspace is growing super fast

Arjun: facebook will be growing faster
dude, i’ll bet you that in 1 year facebook will be larger than myspace

Andrew: holy shit
absolutely
i’ll take that bet
what are we betting?

Arjun: haha, are you serious?

Andrew: absolutely

Arjun: anything, what do you want
cash, fame

Andrew: iphone

We later decided that the evaluation function would be:

Comscore numbers for 1 year from now, July 23rd 2008 12:28am
Monthly unique users for MySpace and Facebook

The current snapshot of numbers
And for those that are curious, here’s the current numbers stolen off a post by Eric @ VentureBeat:

You can see that while MySpace is over 2X larger (109MM instead of 47MM), the Facebook growth in the last month was 22% whereas MySpace’s was about 4.3%. If this rate were to continue, then Facebook would pass MySpace in about 7 months.

I’m betting that the growth slows considerably – in fact, I might have even taken this bet out to 18 months or more, whereas Arjun is betting that it’ll continue or accelerate.

What do you guys think? Which side of the bet would you take?

UPDATE: Couple more numbers: MySpace vs Facebook: MySpace declares Victory from Mashable and also Top social networks for engagement from Jeremy Liew

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Written by Andrew Chen
July 23rd, 2007 at 12:47 am
  • http://www.getkratom.com Kevin

    Facebook, no question. Myspace is useless because of the unreasonable amount of spam but Facebook has solved the very non-trivial task of eliminating spam.

  • Adam

    I would like to say Facebook but the fact that Myspace is 2x the size and still growing makes it a very hard bet. Although there are a couple of permutations to the contest of which I would bet on facebook:
    1. Which site is more relevant (more useful to the user and more $$ for targeted advert)
    2. Facebook will have more active (and non-fake) users
    3. Facebook could be #1 in the US.

    ap

  • http://livinginfirstlife.wordpress.com Jay (living in First Life)

    Myspace. Diggtards don’t matter. Neither do Y-bombs.

  • R Landerdahl

    You forget one thing: 8 out of 10 profiles on myspace are created for spam. I personally know of many webmasters with thousands of myspace profiles. So, yeah, Facebook’s growth rate could slow down, but they’ve got quality, and soon they’ll also have quantity.
    The main reason why facebook has managed to eliminate spam is the same reason why myspace got so big in the first place: myspace profiles are wide-open to the internet, while facebook profiles are closed. This gave myspace a huge advantage in the beginning, but it’s also the reason why it is doomed.

  • http://www.menuism.com Justin Chen

    It’s just as easy to create Facebook accounts as MySpace now and I already got spammed when I posted in the Facebook marketplace. I don’t think either community will be totally safe from the issue. I think MySpace will still be bigger in a year because it seems to be more inclusive of the general population.

  • http://www.techquilashots.com Steve Poland

    Can I get in on this bet and take Facebook too?

    The one thing — ONE THING — MySpace still has going for it.. it’s the place that every music band/artist has a profile and actually keeps their concert dates up-to-date on. There’s likely 300,000 of them at least — it’d be really tough to get them all to move to a Facebook account; although if the users all move over there, they’ll follow (possibly; but I doubt it, as music bands aren’t the most technical of people — majority of them I’m saying, and that is an assumption).

    I have a myspace and FB account, and linkedin, friendster, etc… but I only keep up with myspace and FB .. it was just myspace, but now that FB has been takin over, I’ve been spending time there as well.

    FB is going to explode this year with their platform. MySpace needs their entire site rewritten IMO — the thing is horrid; I don’t know how it still works even. And they don’t want anyone to make money via their site, so all the widget guys are going to focus on FB, and FB will get promotion EVERYWHERE from these app developers [iLike, etc], so more and more people are going to be like, “man, i need to get on FB”. Then they’ll see how much better FB is than MS.. er, not the once-evil microsoft, but rather myspace [now evil w/their closed infrastructure to app developers].

    rant, done.

    facebook = winner in 1 year. I’ll ship you some buffalo wings if i lose; you can ship me a chipotle burrito with a jamba juice smoothie. We don’t have either here in buffalo.

  • http://500hats.typepad.com dave mcclure

    hmmm…

    1) based on uniques, i probably wouldn’t take that bet.

    2) based on page views, i’d be tempted, but would probably still decline.

    3) based on user engagement by other measures than page views, and based on the value of the respective demographic(s), i’d take that bet in a heartbeat — and in fact, probably don’t even need to wait a year… i bet they win now on that basis.

    as usual, the measuring stick is what matters most.

    - dave mcclure
    http://500hats.typepad.com/

    ps – regardless: make the bet 2 years, and i’d take it on any metric you choose.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Arjun_Banker/7901103 Arjun

    Hey hey hey,
    looks like I won ;-)

  • http://www.hollysport.com Betting Tipster

    i put my cash on facebook

  • http://www.hollysport.com Betting Tipster

    i put my cash on facebook

  • http://www.hollysport.com Betting Tipster

    i put my cash on facebook

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