Sponsored Profiles on MySpace Have a Short Head, Too

Nate Elliott | October 09, 2007, 01:25 PM

Card points to an interesting O'Reilly analysis showing that Facebook application usage is heavily concentrated in the head, and that the long tail is very thin. Lots of us have long suspected that only a small fraction of virally-passed games and videos and applications do very well and reach a large audience, and that the vast majority reach almost no one. But O'Reilly paints a stark picture: he says that 87 percent of all Facebook application traffic comes from less than 2 percent of applications.

At Jupiter we began a related piece of research last week, albeit focused on advertisers' social networking profiles rather than external applications. We're tracking the number of friends that advertiser-sponsored profiles and groups have collected on MySpace and Facebook and Bebo. This project is focused on European advertisers only, and it's still ongoing, but so far we've tracked what MySpace tells us is every advertiser-sponsored profile launched in Europe up until August 30, 2007. (We gave the profiles at least one month each to gain some traction before beginning the study.) If you treat local-language variants as a single profile as we did (e.g., a single profile offered in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and English all count as just one profile), that makes 42 sponsored profiles in all.

Within those 42 profiles we saw a classic 80/20 split. 78 percent of all the friendings we tracked were generated by 19 percent of the sponsored profiles. Digging deeper, 48 percent of all friendings came from 5 percent of sponsored profiles -- just 2 of the 42 pages. It's not quite as short a head nor as narrow a tail as O'Reilly found with Facebook apps, but I think it's another strong piece of evidence to support the short-head model of social media.

Look for this analysis across other social networks, along with best practices gleaned from the most successful pages, and consumer survey data on what types of sponsored content and widgets they're most likey to use, in an upcoming European Marketing and Advertising report.