Top 10 social networks in terms of advertising

According to comScore, Facebook doubled its traffic within a year, leaving MySpace behind, but still close. eMarketer reports that Facebook became the number one US social network, with a huge traffic of almost 70.3 million uniques, going up 97% since May 2008. On the other hand, MySpace has 70.25 million, going down 5% since last year’s May. Another interesting aspect is Twitter‘s growth since last year with 2,681 percent! But we’ll talk about this some other time.

What’s Facebook? What’s MySpace?

I don’t use social networks. As I said in the lead of this article, I don’t get the point in using them. But I have a pretty rough idea about them. Facebook is this cool website where everyone wants to be. It’s actually a product with a really good PR. It probably has the best media coverage a social network could have and, despite de venture investments, it’s still an independent network.

MySpace on the other hand, lost a lot of PR buzz after being acquired by Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp. That’s actually bad for PR, because if journalists believe in something when it comes to making a product popular, they believe in the story and it’s relevance, they will always be more attached to independent businesses. It’s actually fun to watch how a small business grows and it’s like watching Discovery Channel: with curiousity, expecting something to happen, no matter if it’s a boom or a bankruptcy. When talking about MySpace, everyone knows there’s always going to be News Corp. to invest money, so the social network’s death wouldn’t be imminent.

After “testing” Facebook for a couple of weeks, after couldn’t be able to understand it, the only difference I could see between these two social networks is that on Facebook you can find people and make some relationships, while on MySpace you can find music. So watching MySpace going down slowly, I believe my question regarding why did Vodafone invested in it is legit.

Still, MySpace overtakes Facebook in terms of advertising

The chart above explains how ad spending looks like on social networks. MySpace takes almost half of all advertising revenues. That’s what having News Corp.’s backing does. Now, MySpace might be first, but that will not be for long. While it’s traffic grew negative, Facebook will probably come first during one year from now.

But is it safe to invest in social networks? A few weeks ago I was reading an article regarding advertising on Facebook, and results weren’t actually satisfying. The CTR (clicktrhough rate) was poor. People don’t really care about ads on Facebook. What Facebook is good for is special projects in terms of PR. Good campaigns are hard to run on Facebook because lots of agencies lack creativity or they just can’t understand social networking and they still can’t imagine how it’s possible to run a campaign on Facebook, for example.

Where’s the real money?

I don’t know Facebook’s revenues during last year, but it’s not hard to imagine that if you still receive money from various venture funds, then you didn’t reach the break-even yet. So how long is Facebook going to pay its employees with other people’s money? It’s probably going to take another two or three years, unless some other social networks will make their way up in the Top 10. And if that happens, well, Facebook has all the “chances” to become one of the biggest crashes in the online history.

Still, that’s not going to happen too soon. And that’s because running campaigns on Facebook is a cool and trendy right now. But it’s going to be really fun to watch.