Posted by I was settling into a long Air Canada flight from Montreal to Vancouver and all primed to read the cover story from BusinessWeek called, Beyond Blogs – What Business Needs To Know (June 2, 2008), when I came across a regular column called, Facetime, by Maria Bartiromo featuring Chris DeWolfe (the 42-year-old Chief Executive of the online social network, MySpace). You all know the drill: News Corp. snagged the MySpace guys for $580 million in 2005, and since then they’ve been fending off the comparisons to Facebook, etc…
There was one question that seemed kind of straight forward: "How have things changed since Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace?"
I was expecting some pap answer around how the company is still trying to figure out the fit, the monetization, etc… but check out DeWolfe’s answer:
"At the time that News Corp. bought us, we had somewhere around 22 million unique users. Now I think we’re close to 120 million unique users worldwide. Our site has also become less of a niche site, where in the early days it was the creative trendsetters that were really driving the growth — from musicians to artists to actors to comedians. Now it’s everybody. So the demographic has widened a great deal. Forty percent of all mothers in the U.S., believe it or not, are on MySpace. Twelve percent of all Internet minutes are spent on MySpace. Forty-five percent of all the users on MySpace are over the age of 35."
Stop the presses.
Forty percent of all mothers in the U.S. are on MySpace?
Bartiromo picks up on this stat and suggests that maybe it’s just paranoid parents creeping on their kids and DeWolfe shoots back:
"For the most part, they’re using the site for the same reason everyone else is: to socialize. If you look at the Internet generation, where it went mainstream was around 1995. So if you were 25 years old in 1995, you’re now 38, which would be right in the sweet spot of where a mother would be."
Wow.
Never another podcast episode or article 
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times – MySpace is still where the people are, more so than ever. If you’re in digital marketing, you ignore MySpace at your peril.
to be fair though, many mothers are also under 35, so of course they’re on myspace. when we think of mothers, though, we tend to think of OUR mothers.
Call me skeptical but I’d love to see some independent corroboration of these numbers, as they directly impact MySpace’s value as a company and marketplace.
How do they count users? Are these “active” users or every account ever created?
According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are 80+ million mothers: are there really 32+ million mothers regularly using MySpace?
And 12% of all Internet minutes – how is this determined?
Certainly only a fool would ignore MySpace as a marketplace, but impossible to confirm numbers like these, coming from the company itself, should be taken with a grain of salt.
I knew a grandmother of 32 (she was 16 when she had her child who repeated the same mistake,) who finally graduated high-school, at 40.
She is still young enough to be of the MySpace demographic.