MySpace: Old before its time?

The popular social networking site MySpace is for teens. No it's for adults. OK, which is it?

Bloggers were surprised to see a report last week that claimed more than half of MySpace's audience was over 35. The study from ComScore reported that 51.6 percent of U.S.-based visitors to MySpace in August were old enough to remember Abba in the group's prime, up from 39.5 percent the previous year.

But now, bloggers are challenging that report. By looking at visitors and not users, they say, the study is inaccurately characterizing the general population of heavy users.

"A year ago, most adults hadn't heard about MySpace. The moral panic has made it such that many US adults have now heard of it. This means that they _visit_ the site. Do they all have accounts? Probably not," wrote one blogger.

Blog community response:

"There's no evidence that MySpace could know the age of their users: there's an age field on the signup form, but many underage users simply lie. As with most statistics about social networks, we don't really have solid answers."
--Mashable

"Of course, if young users spend 10x the time at the site as older ones it would make the Comscore finding less important. They don't seem to suggest this is the case however, so until further notice I'm going to keep thinking 'wow, Myspace is getting to be an olderspace!'"
--Joe Duck

"While I think it is obviously the case that social networking is penetrating a wider demographic, the Comscore statistics can only tell us so much. They simply tell us who is visiting a site - for any reason - and they clearly don't show a relationship between adult use of SNS."
--Unit Structures