Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

What happens when general websites of any type reach scale.

Think of this in terms of a large retail outlet of physical stores. Once they permeate a market, even it's an entire country, eventually there is no place to go. All the potential customers will be within a relatively short driving business of the store.

What is the strategy at that time? The business starts to work with building up its same-store sales, which is the real barometer on the health of a business that's been in a location for over a year.

So with MySpace growth isn't done yet, as the worldwide Internet market isn't close to being saturated yet. Facebook will also continue to draw its numbers for some time, among other sites.

What the big sites will do is battle for the general Internet population that isn't looking to go deep, but just want to take a quick look at something. That's why online news sites are so popular. Most visitors want to take a quick bite of something, and then go on. This will always be the strategy of the online giants.

The same thing happens to them that happens to everybody else, people will go to that site when they are in a hurry and want to find general information; this will always draw more people. The inevitable always happens and people will migrate to the site that holds that which is of a deep interest to them.

When Facebook allowed people besides college students access to their site, they effectively decided to compete in the general, rather than niche space. It was decided by design. Facebook wants scale. Is that bad? Not necessarily, but it's the reason I say the same thing that is happening at MySpace will eventually happen to them. They'll stop growing exponentially, and eventually start to level off in growth.

Once the Internet becomes mature in its growth, they'll have to deal with the same thing every company has to deal with: figure out ways to make more money on their existing customers - the equivalent of same-store sales.

So what the migration from MySpace to Facebook by young people means is they're simply acting true to their nature. What will Facebook do to keep them? Nothing. Of course they'll try, but when they decided to open things up to everybody, they lost the power of the niche. Once they did that, they had to cater to the general population, not indepth, niche interests.

When young people tire of Facebook, they'll hear about the next new hangout and will go there and populate that for some time. History has shown that this will never stop, it's the nature of the demographic.

Keep these things in mind when you are deciding directions you many want to go. You can't have both, although I still see people in business delude themselves into believing they can. You're either marketing to a niche or you're marketing to the general population; you can't do both and retain a core customer.

Four-part Series on "What the Migration to Facebook from MySpace Means"

What the Migration to Facebook from MySpace Means - Part 1

What the Migration to Facebook from MySpace Means - Part 2

What the Migration to Facebook from MySpace Means - Part 3

What the Migration to Facebook from MySpace Means - Part 4