Did You Know That MySpace Still Reaches 50 Million People Each Month?

Remember MySpace? Although many people consider the early social network to be long gone, the reality is that 50 million users still visit MySpace each month.

Approximately ten years ago, News Corp acquired the company for $580 million, and then subsequently sold it to the Internet ad company Specific Media for $35 million about three and a half years ago. While this massive drop is impossible to ignore, Tim Vanderhook, Chief Executive of Specific Media’s parent company, Viant Inc., claims that MySpace is doing well.

Is MySpace usage actually on the rise? According to Vanderhook, the social networking site continues to attract new users, especially younger people with an interest in music and entertainment. Between desktop and mobile devices, MySpace reached 50.6 million unique users in the U.S. in November, which indicates a massive increase of 575% in comparison to November of the previous year.

One possible reason for MySpace’s surge over the past year could be the popular social media ritual “Throwback Thursday”, where users post old photos on networks such as Facebook. Many of these people may be logging in to their MySpace page to retrieve them.

“MySpace was an early photo-sharing platform,” explained Vanderhook. “So we still see a lot of people coming back to access old photos. They may not visit every day but they come back once a week or once a month.”

Although MySpace still has access to over a billion registered users globally, and over 465 million U.S.-based email addresses, Vanderhook acknowledges the fact that many of these users haven’t been active on the site for years.

So, what does the company have in store for the future?

Vanderhook believes that MySpace’s pool of registered data will be able to serve as the centerpiece of a major new cross-channel marketing initiative, which Viant is referring to as “The Advertising Cloud”. He explained that Viant has lined up registered data from multiple online media companies to combine with the MySpace data. Although he hasn’t indicated which companies are supplying this data, Vanderhook did note that it’s not Google, Facebook or Amazon. He continued by explaining that Viant will take that registration data, anonymize it, and then connect it with advertisers’ own in-store shopping data. The company feels that this combination will provide advertisers with a true read on how their online advertising impacts real world sales, which is an important factor for marketers and businesses to consider.

Viant claims that several big advertisers are trying this out, but Vanderhook hasn’t given an indication of which brands are involved. However, he did say that since May, the Advertising Cloud suite of products has handled $5 billion in ad transactions for a set of beta advertisers. “We’ve seen return on investment improve by a factor of 10 or 20,” said Vanderhook. “This is game-changing.”