From Yahoo News: Friendster logged 703,000 visitors to its site in April, a 15 percent drop from the year-ago month and the average visitor spent 14 minutes on the site that month, down 65 percent year over year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. By contrast, MyPlace boasted 8.2 million visitors in April, who spent an hour and 23 minutes on the site.
As Friendster CEO, Sassa has tinkered with offering horoscopes, news headlines and Weblogs to boost the amount of time users spend on the site, a notion called “stickiness” in the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.
Tinkered being the operative word. Site looks much better than it first did but who cares about horoscopes? News headlines? Both features are staples of my.yahoo.com and have been for years. Trailblazing is what is needed not replication.
Look at the configuration screenshot, that’s only one of about 3 screens full of customization options on MySpace.
8.2 million visitors! That’s an incredible number. 83 minutes isn’t as sticky as I would have thought. Heck, I spend 30 minutes at Myspace yesterday customizing my blog and I didn’t even send any hout outs to my peeps. I’m sure people deep into customizing their pages, writing their blogs and actively writing testimonials and networking their bands spend a lot more than 83 minutes a month.
