eMarketer just published an article projecting that MySpace will take the lions share 61% or $525 million dollars of estimating $865 million in 2007 total ad spending; second tier sites such as Facebook, Bebo, Piczo, Friendster, etc will share $200 mil; third tier portal sites such as MSN Spaces, Yahoo! 360, AIM Pages, Orkut, etc will take $95; while vertical and marketer-sponsored social networks will take the $45 remainder.

The report cited in the article was written in back October 2006 and reflects MySpace's primacy at the time. However, the same article confirms Facebook's emerging dominance with the 17-25 set. When asked in a poll to list their three favorite sites, Facebook is preferred to MySpace by females 2 to 1 and by males nearly 3 to 1. Based on our observation, teens are now getting into Facebook as early as high school, cementing their use by the end of college and keep it their top social networking platform after graduation. We are also seeing a huge migration of twenty-somethings from MySpace who were not exposed to Facebook in college. The age bracket preferring Facebook will widen to 17 - 30 if not 12 - 30 in five years.

Facebook recently revealed 2.9% growth month over month. Assuming that rate persists for 52 weeks, that's 340% annualized. The 10 million users in Fall 2006 cited in the article is already way outdated. The most recent number is 18 million. Same time next year the number will be 79 million users while MySpace will see much less growth if not decline from its current saturation of the domestic market.

The other issue is traffic quality. If you've been reading our reports, much of the traffic on MySpace now is spam. Reading and deleting junk messages inflates the page count enormously while the traffic on Facebook is still relatively honest, though that has been changing too to a more commercial character.