Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

From the online coverage of Facebook, you'd think they were demolishing MySpace (NWS-A) and the News Corp. owned company was falling on its face. In reality, the opposite is happening.

Using unique visitors as the metric, MySpace is doing really good. With Facebook being much smaller, they will of course have the higher percentage of growth, that's a given by any successful company starting out.

For MySpace, they grew by 33 percent year-over-year, reaching 61.3 million unique visitors in July. Facebook grew by 129 percent, to garner 129 percent growth.

When you move from percentages to actual numbers though, MySpace is still outpacing Facebook by a significant amount. Roughly, MySpace grew by about 15 million unique visitors, while Facebook grew by around 10 million. In other words, 33 percent of about 45 million is a much better number than 129 percent of about 8.5 million. That means over the last year Myspace grew by around 5 million more than Facebook, as far as unique numbers go.

Another surprising statistic to some is the amount of time spent on each network. MySpace clobbered Facebook here, growing by 36 percent over the year, with users now spending almost three hours on the site a month. For Facebook, that number has only grown by 7 percent, to reach just over an hour.

MySpace also projects over $200 million in operating profits over the next fiscal year, on about 1 billion in revenue.

The reason I bring this all up, is we as online marketers need to listen cautiously to data and information that is being thown around. Just because something is getting a lot of press doesn't necessarily mean its very profitable or that it's outperforming the competition.

Even Rupert Murdoch has been saying everyone's abandoning MySpace for Facebook, which is probably a tactic he's using to quietly go around making a ton of money with MySpace. News Corp. is notorious for sending out misinformation to baffle and confuse its competitors.

We need to remind ourselves, especially in the online marketing world, that hype is the basic currency of a lot of online writers. Check and double check things before you buy into something that may impact your business. We need as accurate picture as possible in order to make quality decisions. Make sure you're seeing the whole picture, and not just what others want you to see.