Myspace.com is described as a popular social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos internationally.

Critical mass is loosely defined as a size, number, or amount large enough to produce a particular result (the critical mass of activity needed for a retail store). It is often defined in terms of physics as the amount of a given fissionable material necessary to sustain a chain reaction at a constant rate.

Over the course of the past several days I have set out to do an experiment using Myspace. I wanted to know when or if a Myspace account would reach Critical Mass in sense of the physics definition. In other words how many friends would I need to invite into my little circle before A) I no longer had to make effort to add them because they were coming to me and B) how many friends would I need to actually notice a sustained effect on my blog’s (this site) traffic if I marketed it on my Myspace account.

In answer to the first when I hit around 500 friends the requests started to trickle in. I got around 20 unsolicited friend requests that day. When I hit just over 1000 friends they started to pour in. I seem to average about 75-120 requests per day. I’m not sure at this point if I’m at critical mass wherein my growth rate will be consistently where it is at for the foreseeable future, or if I will pass another threshold and suddenly start seeing another increase in the requests.

Who cares, right? That’s all pretty boring information. If not for my desire to try and figure out the answer to the second question posed above I probably wouldn’t care either. I’m perfectly content with my “real” Myspace account that has all of 6 friends on it.

First things first. No, marketing this blog to over 1500 friends on Myspace did not make a great deal of difference in the sustained numbers of readers. A little, but nothing overly impressive. That said I will say that when I was heavily campaigning this blog (posting lots of bulletins, and comments pointed towards it) my traffic would spike to a large extent. When I stopped it would drop back down wiping out 95% of the gains made.

Second thing is that despite the spikes in traffic my click-through rate on my adds remained at zero. Except one add which had one click on it. I wasn’t to surprised by this however I was certainly a little disappointed. That said I do believe it is readily fixable. The Myspace demographic tends to be teens to early 20s so if instead of marketing the blog as whole to them I start marketing the specific articles that might interest them it should (in theory) do two things. First it will give them a reason to come back in the future and second it will make my Adsense and my Kontera ads display things that might be of more interest to them and hence increase the clicks.

Wish me luck, this is all just a giant experiment for me at this point! God bless and thanks for reading!

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