20-Year-Old Cancels MySpace Account, Site Folds
The Wall Street Journal's free online article today features a FUD piece on the decline of MySpace. For the record WSJ's freebies, in the hopes of generating paid subscribers through high blog linkage, tend to have a geek slant to them and for a Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) article that goes double.
Ms. Thompson created a MySpace page two years ago, she found herself sifting through dozens of requests daily from would-be acquaintances seeking to link to her page. Ms. Thompson, who resides in New London, Conn., was sick of the comments and posted a farewell ode before deleting her page:
"good bye myspace. I've always hated you. I just never had what it took to leave."
Jenny! NOOOOOO!!111oneoneone.
More after the jump
Now WSJ drops the biggest bomb on MySpace's membership retention problems. In September, according to numbers Nielsen pulled out of a magic hat, unique U.S. visitors at MySpace fell 4% to 47.2 million from 49.2 million in August.
Charles Buchwalter, an analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings, says the slowdown is seasonal; last September, both sites also lost visitors as students went back to school.
A MySpace spokeswoman offers that there has been "absolutely no increase in the rate of deletions."
What, that's it? That's quote was on paragraph 7, WSJ reporter Vauhini Vara's goose just got cooked, yet this article has 10 more paragraphs of drivel, including this gem.
James Kalyn...kept receiving friend requests from half-naked female strangers through his MySpace page. But after looking at a few profiles, he realized: "If it's a picture of someone fairly attractive, they're probably not my friend in real life."
This is MySpace's fault because....?
