MySpace Is For Adults?

From a Comscore press release, titled More than Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older

comScore Media Metrix, a leader in digital media measurement, today released an analysis of the users of leading social networking sites, revealing that significant age differences exist between the user bases of these sites. Visitors to MySpace.com and Friendster.com generally skew older, with people age 25 and older comprising 68 and 71 percent of their user bases, respectively. Meanwhile, Xanga.com has a younger user profile, with 20 percent of its users in the 12-17 age range, about twice as high as that age segment's representation within the total Internet audience. Not surprisingly, Facebook.com, which began as a social networking site for college students, also draws a younger audience. More than one-third (34 percent) of visitors to Facebook.com are 18-24 years old, approximately three times the representation of that age segment in the general Internet population.

Comments (18) | Posted October 5, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

Very surprising. I wonder how the trends are shifting (e.g. now that Facebook is open to all, how fast its users' age numbers are convering with MySpace's).

Posted by: Cem Sertoglu | Oct 5, 2006 2:40:11 PM

While more then half of their visitors may be 35+, far less then half of their pageviews are from visitors 35+. As such, companies purchasing non-age-targeted advertising are still likely to see a very high percentage of younger users.

Posted by: John DeMayo | Oct 5, 2006 2:49:07 PM

Also remember to skew the stats higer on myspace where kids routinely misrepresent their ages so that their profiles can be viewed by anyone...

Posted by: Nathan Black | Oct 5, 2006 2:50:33 PM

I'm not an expert on comScore's methodology and technology, but wouldn't a teenager/youngster using her/his parents computer, tracked by comScore, at home skew the aggregate number upwards significantly for a site? It would seem so as only 34 % of Facebook users are in the 18-24 bracket according to comScore and 33.5 % is 35-54. I guess that Facebook's registration data would paint a very different picture...

Posted by: Henrik Torstensson | Oct 5, 2006 3:34:20 PM

Danah Boyd has some good comments about age reporting of teens in her recent video that she posted here.

Nathan has hit it on the head, kids lie about their age, and go ridiculously large rather than just over 18. This skews the naieve analysis of the demographics.

Posted by: Geoff Wilson | Oct 5, 2006 8:04:07 PM

Well, I'm exactly that age, and I'm now a My Space user. I signed up a long time ago, but since I have my own blog and flickr, I never really played with it (plus, it's S-L-O-W).

But now I've been pulled in. A lot of my friends are musicians, and now they have MySpace profiles. SOme other of my friend have decided to start blogging or have a website, and MySpace was a great way to start -- so I go there to check them out, too. Oh, and while I'm there, maybe I'll look for "so-and-so". Invite? Sure! My profile is boring, maybe I'll edit it...

Posted by: scott | Oct 6, 2006 5:11:17 AM

The point has been made above but it is worth repeating, there are an awful lot of 99 year old users on MySpace - and not all of them are teens. One of the great worries about the Web 2.0 debate is the ready acceptance of very dubious statistics which spread around the network so quickly before their methodology is challenged.

In any case, even if these figures were correct, surely the important issue is which age ranges use MySpace for the longest period of time per day?

Posted by: John Dodds | Oct 6, 2006 5:49:03 AM

Please visit My MySpace page:

http://myspace.com/fonksquish

I am 35 years old, and upon hitting that birthday this year, I felt old.

Posted by: Chuck Fishman | Oct 6, 2006 6:08:04 AM

Also, there are lots of fake or character profiles on MySpace:

Hannibal Barca
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=42529461

Posted by: Dimitar Vesselinov | Oct 6, 2006 7:04:35 AM

Take a look at Neopets for another interesting age skew.

Posted by: Rob Deichert | Oct 6, 2006 8:01:23 AM

hey everyone:

comscore uses the demographics of their panel to figure out how old every visitor is. so the ages that people put on their pages has no impact on this data.

now comscore's panel may be skewed as Henrik suggested. that is worth looking into.

fred

Posted by: fred | Oct 6, 2006 8:39:24 AM

I'm a little surprised at 35, because I don't know too many married people who have a Myspace profile, and most people over 35 are married (no offense to those who read this who are not married at 35+).

My friends who are 25+ and single seem to be completely on Myspace.

A quick search of my college's area on Facebook... I noticed that there are very few profiles before class of 2002, so the typical Facebook users are less than 25.

Posted by: Rick | Oct 6, 2006 10:29:58 AM

You're right to point out that they use a panel system but when I read their methodology before commenting, it seemed to be very skimpily explained and there seems to be some questioning about the validity of research metrics in this field (see here for example - http://www.adweek.com/aw/iq_interactive/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003156219 ). There's nothing conclusive there and I have no vested interest either way, but to me the over 35 finding just doesn't feel right and I would like to know more before I accept it.

Posted by: John Dodds | Oct 6, 2006 4:23:17 PM

[Apparently competitor NetRatings' age figures are lower, but fairly similar to comscore's in terms of the % of users over 25]. And yes, these numbers are most likely skewed due to methodology. The major issue is that of use of multiple computers within the home. The panel recruitment methodologies vary somewhat between the various firms, but households are supposed to install 'meters' on all the computers in the home. Now, if there are issues with registering who is using which computer, or if there are computers that are left out of the sample then you could have some problems especially with demographics. For the reason some people have mentioned, registration data is also very unreliable since people lie about their age and this tends to skew the averages upward.

Posted by: Rob Leathern | Oct 7, 2006 11:58:21 PM

A quick sanity check suggests that comScore's data is very questionable, as usual.

http://gotads.blogspot.com/2006/10/myspace-demographics.html

With simple search query, I get an unscientific random sample of MySpace profiles.

* 86 MySpace profiles with an age listed
* 74 profiles with age under 35
* 7 profiles with ages 35 - 49
* 2 profiles age 99
* 2 profiles age 100
* 1 profile age 80

Not even close to 40% in 35-49 age group. Nor were there any profiles under 16.

Posted by: John K | Oct 11, 2006 1:06:35 PM

danah boyd says: "MySpace is *NOT* gray" ... a very good post by danah commenting also the irresponsible way these numbers are being used by media and "professionals."

Posted by: Emil Sotirov | Oct 12, 2006 1:14:03 PM

Similar data wit respect to online videos:

http://view.nowpublic.com/?src=http%3A%2F%2Fnettingnews.blogspot.com%2F

Posted by: michael | Nov 15, 2006 2:53:00 PM

To add to that, Myspace blog say that the social networking site is even more popular than Yahoo.

Posted by: profilepitstop | Jan 12, 2007 1:19:09 AM

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