Will the Real MySpace Users Please Speak Up?

Both traditional and social media have declared MySpace dead. Even a brief scan of articles reveals that media mavens “don’t know anybody who uses MySpace anymore,” which reportedly is not a huge loss as the site “is ridden by spammers” and “its atrocious HTML, bLiNgY graphics, and horrific backgrounds” are offensive. Many of you reading this post probably do not know anyone who uses the site either.

Yet MySpace is the 11th most visited site in the world, with unique 60 to 70 million U.S. visitors every month. Even though the site is not growing, it is a far cry from “dead” if you ask me. So, how is it possible for so many millions of people to use MySpace and for no-one to know anyone who does? One possibility is that those who opine on the state of social media don’t use MySpace and neither do their friends. After all, MySpace users are younger and reportedly less well-off than average news makers. Another possibility is that MySpace users are geographically segregated from those who proclaim which sites are “in”, which could explain how the twain shall never meet.

To find out where current MySpace users are, I adapted an old program of mine which looks up MySpace profiles at random, and ran it throughout the month of June, mining demographic and location information from almost 20,000 US-based private and public profiles who logged in at least once during that month (excluding bands and entities). The resulting sample is representative of the MySpace population. 53% of users identify themselves as women. Of all users below the age of 50, half are 21 years old or younger, and 30% are between the ages of 22 and 30.

After some data cleaning, I looked at the geography at the state level, and compared the percentage of log-ins from each state to the percentage of U.S. Internet users in that state. So, if Texas comprised only 8% of US internet population, but contributed 10% of MySpace log-ins, Texas would register as having a quarter more log-ins than expected. Using these data, I created the map below, with red indicating 20% or more log-ins than expected, light red 10-20% more, green being in line with expectations (+/-10%), light blue is 10-20% less, and dark blue representing 20% or less than predicted. [1]

The map shows that the MySpace users are disproportionately represented in Alaska, Hawai’i, Upland South, Lower South, the Southeast, with Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi reporting over 50% more log-ins than expected.[2] Parts of the Midwest as well as California and New York are in line with expectations. The Northeast is well below expectations with Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island reporting only half of expected log-ins. With this map, we are beginning to see that major concentrations of MySpace users are in states which are not traditionally considered as media centers (with one exception…). [3]

It’s almost too tempting to draw a connection to other “red and blue” maps we have seen, but let’s stay on the topic of user geography for a second, because the data become even more intriguing when we start looking at the distribution of current MySpace users in cities with at least 100,000 inhabitants. After extensive data cleaning, I constructed the expected log-in ratio by dividing the percentage of log-ins from a city by the percentage of U.S. population in that city. Here is a small excerpt of the resulting list.

We see that most locations where national news and traditional and social media are produced get fewer than expected log-ins, while places like Louisville, Tampa and Dayton clock up twice as many log-ins as expected. The biggest exception to this rule is Atlanta, GA, the home of CNN. Stamford, CT comes last, with only 20% of expected log-ins given its size.

Finally, I considered all 6,500 U.S. locations in my dataset and put them on a heat map. [4] Again, we see MySpace users are under-represented in most large metropolitan areas, with the exception of Atlanta and its suburbs.[8] But, they are over-represented in mid-size cities of the South, Midwest and parts of the East Coast, as well as certain rural areas across country, again pointing to how some people may never meet MySpace users (no doubt you will spot a number of other fascinating insights in the map).

All in all, the hypothesis that MySpace users and the media centers do not overlap seems to hold. Except Atlanta. Why CNN won’t report on MySpace users I don’t know. The users are there, at their doorstep. Maybe it’s time for real MySpace users to speak up? It seems no-one else will.

Notes

Miko?aj Jan Piskorski is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School, where he teaches a second-year elective entitled Competing with Social Networks.