MySpace shows there's life in the old dog yet by garnering more unique visitors a month than Tumblr, Google+ and Pinterest, in the US at least.
Once the homepage of every emo kid with a passing knowledge of HTML, a digital camera and nothing to lose, MySpace has fallen on hard times having been usurped by Facebook and sold by its previous owners at a huge loss.
But if you thought the newly rebranded social network was down and out, you were wrong; although Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all see more unique visitors a month, according to ComScore's latest figures, MySpace is ahead of every hipster's fave, Tumblr, and even Google+.
My my, MySpace
There's a case to say this is down to residual traffic, but the network is also carving a niche as an online music destination.
MySpace still has pretty impressive search rankings for specific search terms – for example, any band that uses MySpace as its surrogate website is likely to come top for that search term, and there are plenty of pockets of people searching for plenty of medium-sized bands, and those visits all add up.
But if you look at the time spent on each of these sites, it's a very different story: Facebook is far and away the clear winner, racking up an average of 394 minutes per visitor each month, but Tumblr comes in second at 141.7 minutes.
MySpace gets a relatively measly 12 minutes on average – but it's still ahead of Google+, which manages to capture each visitor for an average of only 5.1 minutes a month. Ouch.
Although ComScore hasn't released the relative UK or global figures, we suspect they may be slightly less pleasant reading for MySpace fans - Hitwise last year revealed that MySpace is out of the UK's top ten social networks, while Tumblr came in seventh (albeit using different metrics).
The less-awful-than-expected figures coincide with the following comments from Rupert Murdoch, the site's previous owner: "Many questions and jokes about My Space. Simple answer - we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons."
Let's hope the new owners, which include such web moguls as Justin Timberlake, have learned from News International's costly screw ups.
Via The Next Web, Hypebot
