The New York Times has a front page story today on the decline of mySpace, the once-popular social networking site that has now been outpaced by Facebook. As with other social networking sites, mySpace has struggled to maintain its popularity; a high-profile merger with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation did little to accelerate growth, and the company has announced that it will lay off half its staff.
MySpace built a portion of its base on bands, who used the site to reach out to fans, but one interesting and often overlooked aspect of the site’s population concerns the racial and economic characteristics of its users. The Times notes that the only demographic that increased in population on mySpace in 2010 were Americans who earned less than $25,000 a year; by contrast, Facebook’s more affluent users have remained more appealing to advertisers. danah boyd, a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has conducted extensive research on the racial and economic differences between mySpace and Facebook users. boyd and other researchers have noted that white users are more likely to use Facebook, fleeing mySpace as a sort of virtual ghetto similar to the white flight into suburbs during the mid-20th century.
The high socioeconomic status of Facebook was highlighted in David Fincher’s The Social Network, the much-publicized 2010 film that followed Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg as he launched the site as a Harvard student. Initially, Facebook was only open to Harvard students, but it soon expanded to other colleges, and eventually became open to any user over the age of 13 with an email address. Given the apparent drop of exclusivity – carefully calculated by Facebook, undoubtedly – after a period of highly controlled access, in retrospect it’s unsurprising that Facebook managed to gain the upper hand.