In case you haven't noticed, today's comment by RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan that MySpace could be worth between $10 and $20 billion in a few years' time has set the blogs abuzz. Rohan backs up this claim -- which many are taking very seriously -- by pointing to MySpace's "raw, unprecedented user/usage growth."
True, MySpace has a lot of users. There's no doubt that it is the number one social networking site on the web, and Fox Interactive Media, owners of MySpace, continue to claim that the site has over 100 million registered users.
Today, ForeverGeek has this post which questions MySpace's 100 million user number. Using some admittedly fuzzy math, Barbarian (the post's author) randomly sampled 300 MySpace accounts and found only 43% of them to be real, active users. The allegation that MySpace's 100 million user number is inflated is nothing new, and roughly 43 million users is still an impressive amount. Read the full post to see the details of his research.
I'd like to extend Barbarian's argument by asking this: Will MySpace produce hard numbers or own up to its inflated claims? If Barbarian's claims are largely true, I think MySpace's advertisers would want to know.
