UPDATE: I lost. And bought Arjun a new iPhone. Congrats Arjun!
The bet: Which social network will be bigger?
Oh this will be fun ;-) My friend Arjun (ex-Amazon, currently at Zillow) and I had the following conversation when we were talking about widget development:
Andrew: why not be more excited about the myspace integration possibilities? that’s like a 5X bigger ecoysystem
Arjun: yuck.
Andrew: ??
Arjun: myspace already has too many issues
their UI is so cluttered that it would be impossibleAndrew: i think you might just be techno-elitist
Arjun: facebook is already getting cluttered
Andrew: which biases your business calculations
Arjun: yeah, that’s probably true..
Andrew: i mean, are you separating your business evaluation and your personal evaluation?
Arjun: but myspace is dead, man.
Andrew: thats so wrong lol
myspace is growing super fastArjun: facebook will be growing faster
dude, i’ll bet you that in 1 year facebook will be larger than myspaceAndrew: holy shit
absolutely
i’ll take that bet
what are we betting?Arjun: haha, are you serious?
Andrew: absolutely
Arjun: anything, what do you want
cash, fameAndrew: iphone
We later decided that the evaluation function would be:
Comscore numbers for 1 year from now, July 23rd 2008 12:28am
Monthly unique users for MySpace and Facebook
The current snapshot of numbers
And for those that are curious, here’s the current numbers stolen off a post by Eric @ VentureBeat: MySpace is over 2X larger (109MM instead of 47MM), the Facebook growth in the last month was 22% whereas MySpace’s was about 4.3%. If this rate were to continue, then Facebook would pass MySpace in about 7 months.
I’m betting that the growth slows considerably – in fact, I might have even taken this bet out to 18 months or more, whereas Arjun is betting that it’ll continue or accelerate.
What do you guys think? Which side of the bet would you take?
UPDATE: Couple more numbers: MySpace vs Facebook: MySpace declares Victory from Mashable and also Top social networks for engagement from Jeremy Liew