GrindEFX

You may remember in May, Facebook caught up with Myspace in unique visitors in the U.S. for the first time. Well, a month on and the ever-growing social networking site is showing no signs of slowing down, June data from comScore reveals that Facebook’s traffic is sweeping upward, while Myspace is dwindling [click image to make it larger].

Last month Facebook attracted 77 million unique visitors; a rise of 7 million since May, and 10 million since April. This is a staggering rate of growth, especially for a website that has been running for five years.

Myspace on the other hand seem to be struggling. Even though they are still pulling in 68 million visitors a month in the U.S., they are declining rapidly. It looks like unless they do something drastic, they might fall off the social networking map in the near future.

Recently Myspace axed nearly 800 jobs, in the U.S. and internationally, they also appointed former Facebook executive, Owen Van Natta, as CEO. It seems they are confident that they can turn it around, in an interview with TheStreet.com, Rupert Murdoch – CEO of News Corp., Myspace’s parent company – admitted blame for the overgrowth of the site and claimed they are getting back on top of things.

“The business sort of grew out of control and really out of size. I blame myself and it had to be brought back in size, but we feel that we’ve got new creative people and it will be a very strong force in many ways and shouldn’t be compared … I mean, it will be a very different social site to, say, Facebook.” He said.

“Facebook is more of a directory. People go looking for their relatives or their friends, who they are going to meet. With MySpace, people go there to find common interests, share music, that sort of thing.”

Maybe they can re-establish their place in the social networking market, Jason Nazar of DocStoc.com certainly isn’t ruling them out and came up with a seven step plan to save Myspace.

According to TechCrunch, one area that Myspace are still winning over Facebook is page views. In June, MySpace had 32.4 billion page views in the U.S., whereas Facebook generated 21.3 billion. This is hardly suprising though as Myspace’s interface is in such a mess that you have to click through 6 pages to do something you can do on one page on Facebook.

It will be interesting to see how Twitter shakes things up over the next 18 months. I’ll admit I haven’t logged into my Myspace in over a month, however I use Twitter and Facebook everyday. Many of my friends share a similar story.

My thing with Myspace is I can’t see how they are going to attract new users, Twitter and Facebook are sites that I can see everybody having a use for, Myspace’s gap in the market seems to be getting smaller and smaller.