MySpace's relative stability in mobile usage attracts potential buyers

In the first month of 2011, Myspace CEO Mike Jones confirmed that News Corp was looking to spin off or sell his social media and entertainment site. According to reports on Friday, more than 20 parties have already expressed interest in MySpace.

Silicon Alley Insider on Thursday posted a chart concisely titled "The Utter Collapse of MySpace," which showed how the social-network-turned-entertainment-site dropped from 70 million unique views to 45 million uniques between 2010 and 2011. It's a sharp decline, but MySpace has been bleeding users for more than five years, illustrated by Quantcast's estimates below.

As shown in the chart, the first big drop in traffic took place between August and September 2007, which was just about the same time that News Corp officially announced its new video joint venture with NBC would be called Hulu, and MySpace's principal competitor Facebook began to attract serious interest from the biggest names in technology.

Though News Corp. had spent $580 million to acquire Myspace just two years prior, it was already over the hill. Since 2008, MySpace has tried to reinvent itself as a music and entertainment site, but these efforts have done nothing to stem the ebbing tide of users.

Of course, this is just in the United States, and MySpace has actually shown some growth worldwide. The key is its mobile site. According to the comScore report "2010 Mobile Year in Review," MySpace declined by 20 percent in the U.S. overall, but actually gained 32 percent in Europe.

The chart above shows the vastly different action at m.myspace.com (US Version), which launched in Europe in September 2008 in partnership with Vodafone UK, tying the site to the Vodafone Live! page.

MySpace's mobile presence may be one of the main reasons these potential buyers are considering it. That, at least, appears to be the case for Boston-based startup MocoSpace, which made an offer to News Corp. earlier this month. MocoSpace is a mobile-only social network that grew from 11 million users in May 2010 to over 14 million in September 2010.

The addition of MySpace could help the company expand even further, and the rapidly declining full-web version may not even factor into the equation.