MySpace Declines, Facebook and Twitter Grow

According to Experian, nearly 59% of all the social networking visits were visits to Facebook while only 30% were to MySpace - a 55% decrease in market share over the past year in terms of visits for the one-time king of social networks.

Looking at just the year-over-year percent change may give you the impression that Twitter's popularity is through the roof. After all, they posted an increase of over 1000 percentage points. But the truth is, their percentage of visits still remains relatively low. Only 1.84% of visits to social networking sites in September were to Twitter, bringing them in at #4 on the chart.

What? Tagged Beats Twitter?

Facebook and MySpace beat Twitter out for the top two spots, but you may be surprised to see who came in at #3: Tagged. Yes, Tagged, the social networking site that's best known for getting busted in an email invite scam is beating out Twitter.

Although we like to think that spammy marketing tactics don't pay off, it seems that for Tagged they have. Their aggressive methods in the past involved having new registrants add their contact lists to the service which Tagged then used to send out "invites" to everyone in the user's address book. The worst part is that the invites looked as if they came from the individual users when really, most were completely unaware anything had been sent out. Tagged has also been known to send out emails that force users to sign up for accounts in order to see shared photos from other users, even going so far as to guilt-trip recipients into signing up with messages that read: "If you don't click, [the person] may think you said no :(".

As despicable as these tactics are, they've helped Tagged grow and remain profitable. ComScore reported the site had 32 million visitors in April of this year, up from 14 million the prior year. And once there, the visitors are staying engaged, generating over 5 billion pageviews during that month.

Believe it or not, the company is still growing according to the Hitwise data, albeit at a slower rate than it did a couple of years ago when it was adding more users per day than MySpace. In September of 2008, the site received 1.62% of social networking visits and this September, they received 2.38%. Although those numbers are small, they're still larger than Twitter's who came in at 0.15% last year and 1.84% this past month.

Even worse, when calculating the time spent on the social networking sites, Tagged has shown an increase there as well. They're up from 23 minutes in September of 2008 to 25 minutes in September 2009. Meanwhile, Twitter is showing a decrease from 36 minutes to just under 16 minutes year-over-year, a loss of 56%.

Although Hitwise focuses on U.S. traffic only, these findings go against everything we've heard about Twitter and its popularity - in fact, they seem to confirm that there may be more media hype surrounding the microblogging network than there is actual engagement among its users.

It would be interesting to compare the number of users each network has with the visits, but that would be hard to do since Twitter refuses to release those sorts of statistics. Meanwhile, we're left wondering if Hitwise has had some sort of massive system glitch in their system or if we've just seen proof of how Twitter's supposed popularity is just all talk.