Today is Facebook’s F8 conference is taking place in San Francisco, helping to keep the spotlight omnipresent upon the social networking category. In the US, MySpace continues to be the largest social network and the market share of visits was 3.5x that of Facebook for the week ending July 19, 2008. However, in terms of growth, traffic to Facebook increased 23% when compared to the same week last year while MySpace was down 29%.

Now size is one difference between the websites and where the users are located is another. We have recently launched a tool at Hitwise where our clients can access DMA® level data for both websites and categories to understand the share of traffic from local regions. As an example, here are the top 10 DMAs by size for both MySpace and Facebook for the 4 weeks ending July 19, 2008. The top DMA for MySpace is LA while the top DMA for Facebook is NYC- which is not surprising considering that these two cities are the 2 largest DMAs in overall size and tend to be significant for most national websites.


When comparing the DMAs of the 2 websites to one another, an interesting trend pops out – MySpace visitors are more likely to be located on the west coast while Facebook has heavier representation on the East Coast (the coasts where each company was started). The 20 DMAs with the highest representation index for for MySpace when compared to Facebook, meaning the likelihood of the visitor to go to MySpace vs. Facebook (over 100 increases the likelihood, below 100 decreases the likelihood) are all located on the west coast. The trend is also illustrated below when looking at the top 10 DMAs for MySpace, where the West Coast DMAs dominate.

When the situation is reversed to compare Facebook to MySpace, the East Coast and Midwest becomes more prevalent. This trend is a good one for advertisers that are considering placing geo-targeted ads on social networks where each of the 2 major players are exhibiting strengths in particular areas.

Could the younger audience of MySpace potentially create geographical boundaries or is the starting point for each company simply continuing to dominate through networks of friends based upon proximity? Since Facebook is somewhat more widely distributed geographically, one random theory could be that Facebook attracts a higher share of users aged 25 and up that are more likely to be finished with college (particularly due to Facebook’s initial start with college students) and/or have relocated away from their hometowns, creating a wider group of geographically disbursed colleagues.