One of the big stories yesterday was the comScore report suggesting that “Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older”. Others have jumped on – GigaOm got some confirmation from Fox, MySpace’s owner, on the numbers (though many of the comments seem quite sceptical). My initial reaction to the headline was “get a life, adults” – one isn’t surprised to hear that kids spend a lot of time in social networking sites, but adults? Blech. But the data is obviously meaningful – older customers buy different things, but perhaps more importantly are much less inclined to be persuaded by or even interested in advertising. In any event, I was surprised, then sceptical, but ultimately not interested enough to dig in.
Today brings John DeMayo’s post questioning comScore’s claim, and now it’s game on. John notes first that the demographics of uniques is not reflective of the demographics of traffic in this case, but also dug deeper by doing zip code searches for users by age range. The results are interesting, and paint a very different picture than the comScore report – the under 35 group is considerably larger than the over 35, according to his (entirely unscientific) analysis. Good work – I’m hoping someone picks up the torch and carries this question further.
Update: The controversy continues.