Is that MySpace in the rear-view mirror, Twitter users may wonder? Why, yes, it is, at least in the UK. According to Hitwise, the web research company, the number of UK visits to Twitter exceeded that for MySpace in the UK for the last week of August.
Twitter had more visits than MySpace in the UK in the final week of August 2009. Source: Hitwise
As Hitwise puts it, "for the week ending 29/08/09 Twitter.com picked up 1 in every 400 UK Internet visits and ranked as the 27th most visited website in the UK, one position above MySpace."
That's some shocking graph though for the progress (or lack of it) for MySpace in the UK - but it fits with what we have written before about its fading attraction compared to Facebook and, yes, Twitter.
As Robin Goad of Hitwise notes, "If anything, Twitter is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterrific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers would be even higher. Of course, MySpace also picks up a significant amount of traffic outside of the MySpace.com domain, particularly via mobile platforms."
That "Twitter is bigger than you think" comes from what we could call the API effect, where lots - perhaps as much as 80% - of the traffic doesn't go through its website, but through its API. (And that's an interesting admission by Hitwise, noted for future reference, that it measures browser traffic, not port 80 traffic, when it does its statistics. Thanks, Robin.)
However, a couple of pinches of salt with which to season this:
a) school's out. Possibly many of MySpace's core users are school-age, and are off on holidays doing non-computer things. (Well, you can hope.)
b) work's not out. Twitter users skew older, so they may still be around and using their accounts, which could have pushed up the numbers.
Overall though it all looks dangerously like a trend for MySpace. After all the staff clearouts and other actions, it remains to be seen whether it's going to be able to turn that around. In which case Rupert Murdoch is really going to need those paywalls to work.
