Always be wary when the number "millions" is used, whether deaths in Dafur or the number of NASA Web site hits or the population of MySpace.
These million-based numbers hang around, because most journalists don't do math -- that's why they became journalists. Large numbers helps their profession; it's more impressive when "million" can be used in a headline for their stories, such as "the earth is this year the hottest in a million years."
Not just journalists. Organizations benefit financially from the untested claim of "millions", whether charitable groups looking to increase donor income, NASA looking to increase government funding, or the owners of MySpace to get a return on their investment.
On the day that headlines are proclaiming MySpace could be worth $15-20 billion in a few years, Forever Geek does much-needed research for us: Debunking the MySpace Myth of 100 Million Users.
The Results
...it turns out that MySpace really has roughly 43,000,000 users. More than 50% can't even bother to visit again after a month.
This should come as no surprise. When Web sites were new, many people experimented with creating one (because it was the trendy thing to do), found it was too much hassle to maintain, and left a landfill of "Under Construction" signs littering cyberspace. Same for blogs, for MySpace, and for whatever else comes along that's free, trendy, and a pain to maintain.
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