MySpace CEO Quits As Facebook Has 10x Daily Reach

Owen Van Natta, the CEO of MySpace since April 2009, is on his way out. Owen was hired from rival Facebook where he served as Chief Operating Officer.

In a statement, MySpace said Mr Natta will be replaced a by two people, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn.

This is probably the best thing that could happen for MySpace. Perhaps because I’m getting old as the hills now, but everyone I know has already migrated away from MySpace to Facebook.

The following graph show’s the social network’s overall reach has dropped from 8% to just above 3% over the past 18 months (no end in sight for the decline):

Are other top executives going to run for the doors as the ship sinks? Will a new leadership team get MySpace back on course? The near future will tell.

Here’s Facebook’s reach graph showing 30% (10x more traffic than MySpace now):

YouTube Removes Stats for Number of Videos a User Has Viewed

YouTube has permanently removed the stats display for the number of videos a user has watched from user profile pages. Anyone who spends much time on YouTube quickly so the number of videos they viewed reach into the thousands or tens of thousands.

When I first noticed the display was gone, I assumed it was because people were complaining to YouTube that they did not want the world to know they had watched 300,000 videos. By chance I was browsing a YouTube developer/bug report forum on their site and came across the following post from a legitimate YouTube staff member:

“We’ve seen some of you asking what occurred to the number of video views displayed on your channel. Unfortunately, due to technical constraints, we had to permanently disable this feature. This is not a bug, it is no longer an available feature on the site.”

Looks like you can kiss that stat goodbye.

Facebook Tops Google Traffic For 3 Days in One Week

Facebook topped Google’s traffic again on New Year’s Eve, marking the 3rd time in a 7 day period the Social Networking giant exceeded Google’s US Visitor count according to Hitwise, an independent traffic monitoring firm.

Apparently people were constantly updating their status with their latest meal highlights and wishing holiday greetings to their 300 friends more often than they were searching for how to bake a ham, or find driving directions. Facebook kicking off 2010 as the number 1 site in the US seems appropriate after the huge year the company had in 2009.

Facebook Advertisers Are Not Cheering
There has been a noticable decrease in Facebook Advertising performance over the past several weeks. It seems like most of the additional traffic is not as productive as the standard daily user, I’d have bet the opposite. Stats have been delayed over the past 48 hours as they are updating or fixing the ad system. Over the past 24 hours, we saw only one ad approval cycle.

Facebook Click Prices Take NYE Rest

Finally, after more than seven days of outrageous prices, Facebook ads are back in the zone. Noticeably, the United Kingdom, France, Norway, and Canada are showing cost per click declines around 50% versus one week ago.

Are advertisers simply taking a break for the New Years holiday? Did affiliates burn up their ad spend during the pricey Christmas Holiday? Are some of the larger Brands done with their Christmas spending blitz for another year? Maybe it’s a combination of all the above.

Looks like anyone who decided to skip the Holiday vacation is going to be rewarded nicely.

The Facebook FriendFeed Fail

Remember back in August when Facebook bought FriendFeed for approximately $50 million to go to war with Twitter? The terms of the deal were actually $15 million in cash and the other $32.5 million is in stock (based on a Facebook valuation of $6.5 billion at the time). With Facebook’s IPO coming closer, it’s likely the stock position of the FriendFeed founders will be worth more than $35 million.

Traffic has plummeted on on FriendFeed since the acqusition. Over the past month there have been several days with less than 5,000 US visits. (shown here on quantcast,click on day).

With 12 employees at Friendfeed, this amounts to around 400-500 unique US visits per employee per day. As any blogger knows if you post 5 posts per day on relevant or trending topics you will exceed this number easily.

Now, just picture that $50 million dollars. Ouch!