The Transition of Users from MySpace to Facebook
A study published by Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd argues that a “white flight” occurred from MySpace to Facebook, where users who tended to see MySpace as a “outdated, ghetto-like”, whom she argued were mostly mid-upper class white and Asian teenagers, fled to Facebook, creating a racial, social divide between the two sites. The author uses statistical evidences as well as interviews to argue that, as MySpace was soon left with lower-class black and latino students, it became the “digital ghetto”.
While the racial and social implications of this phenomenon is certainly interesting, it is also quite interesting to observe how network effects must have influenced the decisions of these teenagers. In class, we learned how the reservation price – how much a person values a certain product (in this case, the use of a social networking site) – is determined by two factors. First, there is the person’s own reservation price, independent of the network. Secondly, there is the network effect, which is determined by how many people are using the product. Even with the exact same amount of users as seen by the upper-class group and the lower-class one regarding MySpace, the network effects each experienced must have been different. Since the former group had many of its friends (who are also mostly upper-class) in Facebook, it was more likely to choose Facebook over MySpace since the network effect of MySpace on these teenagers was minimal, while the opposite must have been true for lower-class individuals.
Another interesting observation is how the media affected the expected number of users of each site – which in turn influenced the actual number of users. Boyd describes in the article how the New York Times ran a piece titled ‘Do You Know Anyone Still On MySpace?’, the title of which seemed to suggest that Facebook was now the new “trend” in social networking, when there were still roughly equal number of users in both sites, as the article states. This kind of expectation for Facebook being the new mainstream created a high expectation for Facebook, and a low one for MySpace. Thus, since equilibrium exists where the actual number of users equals the expected one, the number of users in MySpace decreased, and that of Facebook increased.
Since the article does not talk about these network effects in detail, it is still uncertain whether the above assertions about the network effects playing a role in this “White Flight” is true or not. However, the article does provide a good example with which we could apply what we know about network effects and see how that matches with the outcome.
Link: ‘White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook’, http://www.danah.org/papers/2009/WhiteFlightDraft3.pdf