MySpace halves UK audience

MySpace has halved its UK audience within the last 12 months, according to new ComScore data.

myspace
MySpace has been losing users to Facebook since 2008.

The new figures reveal that MySpace’s audience numbers dropped by 49 per cent over the last year, falling from 6.5 million visitors in May 2009, to just 3.3 million in May 2010.

The news comes hot on the heels of the site’s major rival, Facebook, hitting 500 million registered users.

MySpace, founded in 2003, at its peak had more than 100 million registered members, but its audience has been declining since the rise of Facebook in 2008.

ComScore’s latest set of data also revealed that nine out of ten of the 38.2 million UK internet users over the age of 15 used social media in May 2010. Twitter was found to have 4.3 million users in the UK but unlike MySpace, has grown its audience by 62 per cent over the last 12 months.

Facebook is used by 30.4 million people in the UK, which worked out as 79 per cent of the country’s online population.

MySpace’s decline is in spite of a revamp of the site’s functionality and renewed focus on music and entertainment content. The site also launched MySpace Music in May 2010, a new streaming and subscription service, which has faced stiff competition from the likes of Spotify and We7.

The site, which was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580 million (£351 million) in 2005, has also lost two chiefs executives in the last six months. First Owen Van Natta stunned staff with his departure after a mere nine months at the helm of the company in February, and then Jason Hirschhorn, one of Van Natta’s replacements, followed suit four months later.