Is MySpace maturing?

That’s what Wall Street and Silicon Valley is asking a day after Rupert Murdoch told the Web digerati that MySpace plans to open itself up to developers, and quietly lowered its fiscal 2008 revenue expectation at the Web 2.0 conference kick-off on Wednesday night in San Francisco.

Asked by conference organizer and former boss of mine John Battelle, Murdoch said of MySpace’s annual revenue, “I might say 750 (million dollars) but it’s at least 30 times what it was the day we bought it two years ago.”

That’s lower than the more than $800 million the top Internet social network was expected to generate this fiscal year. Silicon Alley Insider’s Peter Kafka first alluded to this possibility a few weeks ago.

Then there are the recent comScore traffic figures from the third quarter that show MySpace’s first ever sequential month-to-month decline in traffic. Unique visitors slipped to 68.4 million in the U.S. by September, having peaked at 70.5 million in June.

Bear Stearns analyst Spencer Wang writes: While this can be partly attributed to “the law of large numbers,” this points to Myspace maturing. We will be monitoring this trend closely as continued declines may signal cannibalization from Facebook, which would be a more serious issue than simply maturation. While Facebook traffic also slipped in September on a sequential basis, Wang thinks that has more to do with seasonalities than a slowdown. The same trend has cropped up four times since January 2006, Wang notes.

Law of large numbers?

(Reuters)

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