MySpace Data Makes Me Worry For Our Youth
Using MySpace’s ad platform is a great way to learn things about the MySpace demographics. I was able to look at how many people I could target on MySpace that were interested in a series of books:
- Catch-22: 46k fans
- Brave New World: 73k fans
- The Kite Runner: 111k fans
- Chronicles of Narnia: 119k fans
- Great Gatsby: 124k fans
- Eragon: 140k fans
- Twilight: 472k fans
- The Bible: 1.4m fans
So that is kind of disturbing. Not only is Twilight rapidly catching the Bible, Eragon, a terrible book, is more popular than some of the best books available for targeting on MySpace.
You can pull the same data off of Facebooks Ad Platform:
- Catch-22: 64k fans
- Brave New World: 142k fans
- The Kite Runner: 303k fans
- Chronicles of Narnia: 250k fans
- Great Gatsby: 310k fans
- Eragon: 69k fans
- Twilight: 842k fans
- The Bible: 1.3m fans
This is kind of interesting in several dimensions:
- It seems to indicate a degree of directional consistency. With the exception of Eragon and The Kite Runner, the rankings are in the same order.
- I think Facebooks filters skew the data substantially. Facebook only shows results for people that identify as 18+. That probably shrinks the Eragon fan base substantially. Regardless, I suspect that it shows that Facebook has a more mature audience in that there are far fewer Eragon fans and far more Kite Runner fans, relatively.
- Facebook seems to have more fans in general. I don’t think this reflects the size of their audience because most people agree that Facebook has fewer, albeit almost as many, US users than MySpace. I assume that this means that Facebook does a better job of eliciting information from its user-base that it can use for ad targeting.
- Kids today have terrible taste in books.
- One additional note for reference: Wandering around in the MySpace tool taxonomy pointed me to some reference data for comparison: 90k people likeds Abercrombie and Fitch and 480k liked tattoos, so your average MySpace person would take A&F over classic literatute and would take tattoos over any given book.
- Finally, I wanted to make a UX note: Facebook’s “suggestion” feature is super helpful. I don’t know if MySpace uses a bunch of back-end processes to roll up people into similar groups, but Facebook offers “related terms” to incent advertisers to add more terms. For example, when I typed Eragon, it told me I could also select “Eragon and Eldest” and “Eragon Series”, which were both similarly sized populations. Using those additional two terms grew my targetable population by 20%. MySpace gives you a taxonomy of terms to choose from (in this case, book titles). I assume they are able to roll up all of these, but you never know.
Want a little more junk MySpace data? Here are video games:
- Madden fans: 38k
- Guitar Hero fans: 162k
- Halo: 174k
- GTA: 182k
- WoW: 520k
Clearly, WoW is some people’s religion.
TV:
- 30 Rock: 60k fans
- Colbert Report: 155k fans
- Charmed: 324k fans
- America’s Next Top Model: 348k fans
- American Idol: 748k fans
- Lost: 1.2m fans
- CSI: 1.9m fans
- Family Guy: 3.7m fans
Family Guy is bigger than Jesus. Betcha didn’t think ANTM was such a big deal! I would have thought that if Family Guy was so obviously huge, that Colbert would do better.
March 4th, 2009 at 8:53 am
When Facebook first launched their platform, I was trying to find what the single biggest “interest” audience was. I can’t recall if it was actually the largest I found or just top 3, but “Family Guy” was definitely there. I would bet that Colbert is higher up the ladder on Facebook than on MySpace. And the biggest crime is that “30 Rock” is so low.
I am also saddened at the list of books, the two best books are ranked the lowest. They actually seem to get progressively worse the higher in rank they go.