As of August 9th, 2006, MySpace has 100 million members. For reference, the population of California is approximately 36 million, and the population of the United States is approximately 300 million.
I think he’s just using it as something to create a conceivable number of people. “100 million people” is hard to imagine. “The equivilent to 1 in 3 Americans…thats EVERY third American you meet.” is a little easier to comprehend.
“1 in 3 Americans could conceivably be MySpace users.”
I didn’t realise MySpace was restricted to just Americans, or were the other 6 billion inhabitants of the planet just overlooked? 
First the Coding Horror stickers and now this?
How typical that an American thinks only of America; 100 million people and they all have to be Americans? Well of course, who else is there?
“I have a hard time believing that 1 in 3 Americans could conceivably be MySpace users.”
I have hard time beliving that you think that only Americans have internet, computer… electricity?
Holy bananas! My country, your country…who cares. Jeff’s not focusing on nationalism here. I am sooooo sick and tired of political correctness - who’s offending who and why and how, etc. Take it for what it is. It was just an example. It wasn’t an attack on anyone’s nationality or an attempt to show that Americans believe that the U.S. is the center of the universe (which, of course, it is…narf!)
Well Germany has 80 Million inhabitants.
So that means, that every German has an account. And 20 million Germans must actually have TWO accounts. WOW
I’m glad you brought this up. I have always wondered about those numbers they’ve published. It’s not unusual for a single user to have multiple accounts (I, for one, am guilty of this), and I was always curious to know if they had actually factored that in their statistics.
Thanks.
XINERGY
I think he’s just using it as something to create a conceivable number of people.
Exactly. Are all the inhabitants of Wyoming annoyed because I picked California? It’s just an arbitrary comparison to get an idea of how many “users” we’re really talking about.
Also, if the LiveJournal stats are representative, 66% of the users are in the US, and 33% are outside the US.
“I have a hard time believing that 1 in 3 Americans could conceivably be MySpace users.”
Okay, Jeff phrased this badly and I was pretty shocked at his provincialism too. But let’s not get hung up on this. Let’s borrow Jeff’s methodology and use the LiveJournal stats page as our guide. About 1 in 4 (3m out of 11m) LiveJournal accounts are from the US. If MySpace is the same, then there are 25m American MySpace accounts. Do we have a hard time believing that 1 in 12 (about 8%) Americans could be MySpace users? That about 3% of Britons could be MySpace users? And that 1% of Americans or 0.3% of Britons are active users?
Those numbers still seem pretty high to me, but not as outrageous as the numbers Jeff headlined. And as Jeff says, without actual usage figures from MySpace or Windows Live Spaces, this is all speculation anyway.
“If the LiveJournal stats are representative, 66% of the users are in the US, and 33% are outside the US.”
Are you sure about this? At the moment, the LiveJournal stats page is saying 10.96m total users, 3.06m in the US. That’s about 28% in the US, therefore presumably 72% outside. That includes all the inactive accounts, of course; I didn’t see any “active accounts only” figures.
Hmm, I think you need to reconsider your readership - we’re not all American y’know; indeed the US of A isn’t actually the centre of the universe dude.
If you consider that the estimated number of actual internet users is somewhere between 700 and 1,100 million people it means that somewhere between 9% to 14% of all internet users are using MySpace. That does seem rather high to me.
???.. How’s possible that if you can’t believe that 1 of 3 americans use myspace, then you REALLY THINK the world is flat and empty beyond US borders?.. Do you really believe that europe, america, asia, africa and australia are disney inventions for your entertaiment?. Let me explain you something:
So maybe, next time you want to write a post that reduce the number of world habitants to 5% you may want to check what’s exists out there beyond your terrorist governent, mc donalds fat children and blonde disfunctional families…
indeed the US of A isn’t actually the centre of the universe dude.
It’s not? grumble time to go rewrite the science books…
If Jeff lived in Canada, he would have used Canada as the basis for comparison. Or if he had lived in Australia, then he would have used Australia.
I think some people have a bad case of USA envy. :evil
Jeff, this is slightly OT, but none of the images in your posts are showing up in my RSS reader–I get scaled “wtf” images instead. I assume you’re referrer-checking and the RSS isn’t on the approved list.
I don’t have a myspace account, but I would say that about 1 out of 3 of my friends does. I realize that is not an accurate cross section of the country though, as I’m pretty sure maybe 1 out of 10 of the people I work with may have one. But I think you are missing an important point. Myspace also has bands and movies and events as “users” so you are right. Since many myspace users are not actual people, and people may have multiple accounts, that number is inflated. But you can’t really compare it to livejournal, a lot of people just start accounts there to post a comment. I’m sure myspace’s user to usage ratio is much higher. Facebook may be a more interesting statistic since you can only have as many accounts as you have valid university email addresses (typically 1).
USA! USA! USA!!!
Sheesh people he’s just trying to make a point.
How about this: there are estimated about 1 billion people with net access ( a href="http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm"http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm/a ). Are we really supposed to believe 1 in 10 of all netizens have a MySpace page?
ICR, Jeff, Eric,
Quit rephrasing please. It’s not exactly like that. If I would analyze some published demographic number, say… people who smoke pipe in my country (roughly 22 million inhabitants) and this number would be 0.1 mil., I wouldn’t try to compare that to the inhabitants in my town, to “get a view”. Knowing that my town has roughly 0.8 mil. inhabitants, the number would seem absurd (one in every eight). But that would be because I’ve made a stupid and irrelevant comparison… It would also point some tendency to see my town as the only relevant town in the country. That would say something about me. Now if you take this analogy and decompose it back to the original context…