MySpace drawing 'older' visitors, study finds

Popular social-networking site MySpace.com, which originated as a place for teens to find dates and learn about bands, is attracting more and more attention from the "older" crowd, according to a study released on Thursday.

More than half, 51.6 percent to be exact, of the U.S.-based visitors to MySpace in August were aged 35 or older, figures released by comScore Media Metrix revealed. A year ago, 39.5 percent were aged 35 or older.

"Social networking is going more mainstream," said Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at comScore Networks. "There has been a lot of media coverage of social networking and that has generated interest among people of all ages."

In addition, the increased interest in online video likely drove some of the boost in traffic from that demographic to the MySpace site, he said. MySpace is now serving up more video than the popular viral video site YouTube.com--1.5 billion streams in the United States in July compared with 649 million streams, respectively, Lipsman said.

Meanwhile, the percentage of total visitors to MySpace aged 12 to 17 dropped from nearly 25 percent last year to about 12 percent in August. The percentage aged 18 to 24 has decreased only slightly, from 19.6 percent last year to just more than 18 percent this year, comScore said.

The total number of unique visitors to MySpace has more than doubled over the past year to more than 55.8 million, according to comScore. The study did not provide any data on the number of registered users, or members, of MySpace.

[Broward Horne]

Social Networking Meme has peaked

Public interest in social networks is peaking, originally verified by Meme Miner and now Google's Trends tool.


http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme?entry=social_networking_meme_verified

[bowergo]

lemmings

Maybe now they will all jump off a cliff. I liked myspace better when it was called geocities. It is such a joy to try and read black text on purple backrounds will trying to find the stupid stop button for the music stream that our point and click, drag and drop web page programmer had to have.

[8ball629]

Pedophiles

The word is out to pedophiles that there are young boys and girls wearing skimpy stuff on a website, that's all.

[Gurpreet Joshi]

There are million times more Pedophiles in our societies

While I do subscribe to your idea that there are some pedophiles who watch young boys & girls but this is certainly not as alarming as it looks like.

[solarflare00559]

Or not...

Or the reason that they are drawing a larger crowed is because most 14 yr old's lie about there age so there profile's are not private, that and alot of ppl put 99 as there age just because..... i don't know where they get there info from but they probally dont even use myspace, al i see is 14 yr old's trying to pretend to be older.........

[nelzp0929]

Parents

You also have tons of parents that signed up to monitor their kids. This study is totally messed up.

[geteel]

Re; Parents

Exactly. With all the recent media coverage, it's finally sinking in to the parents that this is something they need to be monitoring. Hopefully more parents will get the message and start doing their jobs.

[skeptik]

better than the candy store

I'm 38. I find Myspace to be the best place to pick up 16 year old girls. (16 is legal in my state, so all you pedophile-phobes can stop right there.)
lol