Recently I presented at the 2009 Communicators Conference in Portland, Ore. My discussion focused on the changing media landscape and its effect on communication.

It was fun and interesting to talk about the changes I am seeing. With so much transition occurring in our industry, I think it pushes each and every one of us as communicators to be more resourceful as we look to tell our stories or our clients’ stories.

Clearly change can be frightening, and disruptive. However, with the right attitude and actions, I believe we can continue to find great opportunities.

I began my presentation by noting the changes in traditional media and then juxtaposed this with information about social networking sites, hyper-local news sites and consumer generated content. As part of this discussion I honed in on the stats surrounding Facebook and MySpace.

Clearly Facebook has come a long way from being a site for college kids. In early April, the social networking giant announced it surpassed 200 millions users world wide. Facebook also reports it has five million new people joining each week.

Twitter, the social media darling, is also very interesting. As an open network, it provides companies with an easy way to monitor public sentiment and engage with customers in a non-obtrusive manner. In 2008, Twitter grew an astounding 752 percent.

But what about MySpace? No one in my network uses it and I began to wonder about MySpace’s future. To get the most current stats for my presentation, I reached out to MySpace’s PR manager to request the latest user statistics. Here is the data about MySpace she shared with me:

• MySpace has more than 130 million monthly active users around the globe. (March 2009 comScore)
• MySpace has more than 70 million total unique users in the U.S. (March 2009 comScore)
• MySpace is the country’s most viewed site on the Internet. (March 2009 comScore)
• 89 percent of MySpace users are of voting age (18 or older). (March 2009 comScore)
• 40 percent of online Americans are on MySpace. In the UK, it’s as common to have a MySpace account as it is to own a dog.
• 70 percent of people visiting mobile social networks are visiting MySpace. (ABI Research)
• Internationally, MySpace hit 60 million unique visitors, beating September’s record of 54 million. (February 2009 comScore)
• Europe MySpace users surpassed the 29 million user mark, up 0.8 million unique users from August 2008.
• Latin America MySpace users are up 16 percent over the past seven months, reaching 6.8 million users in November 2008.

ENGAGEMENT

MySpace is the top social network in all engagement categories according to comScore. In March 09, users

• spent 16 billion total minutes on the site
• viewed 35 billion total pages
• spent an average of 226.2 minutes on the site

The company has localized versions in 30 regions across 15 languages, including:United States, U.K., Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Latin America (EspaÒol), Mexico, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Australia, China, India, Japan, and New Zealand.

MySpace is one of the fastest growing Web sites of all time:

• 827 Billion rows of data
• 27 Billion comments on the site
• 34.2 Billion mails on the site total
• 41 Million mails per day
• Eight Billion friend relationships
• 6.8 Billion images
• 18 Million images uploaded daily
• 62,507 new videos uploaded to MySpace Video daily
• More than five million artists and bands are on MySpace Music
• Acts including Lily Allen, Sean Kingston, Arctic Monkeys, Colby Caillat, Dane Cook discovered on the site by users

The stats are impressive, but still there are a number of industry luminaries who believe MySpace’s future is limited. To better understand their perspective I recommend reading a New York Times article from May 3, 2009 entitled, “Losing Popularity Contest, MySpace Tries a Makeover.”

If you have a point of view on the future of MySpace, we would love to hear from you. Let us know what you think. Is the bloom off the flower? We welcome your perspective and/or examples of how you use MySpace.