MySpace Dev Platform Catching Up to Facebook

Inside Facebook is reporting that the MySpace Developer Platform, which was officially launched last March (at least, that’s when the app gallery opened to the public in beta), is growing at a healthy clip. Offerpal Media, a leading CPA advertising network for social web apps, such as those on the MySpace or Facebook platforms, tells Inside Facebook that MySpace now accounts for half of their business.

“Roughly half of our overall business is now on MySpace,” Offerpal’s Director of Marketing Matt McAllister told Inside Facebook. “The real story here is how MySpace is beginning to rival Facebook in terms of developer activity.”

Indeed, I counted somewhere in the range of 95-120 new posts on Facebook’s developer forum over the past 24 hours (there was no easy way to do a precise count), and 154 new posts on MySpace’s over the same time period (their forum software gives an exact count). That’s not the greatest indicator of developer activity, but it is perhaps an indicator of developer enthusiasm, and it seems to be there on at least the same level at MySpace as at Facebook.

MySpace’s application directory still appears to list just 1,000 apps (have they stopped approving them or are they merely not doing a good job of reporting the total number in the app gallery?), while Facebook has almost 40,000 applications in its ecosystem. But MySpace’s top applications appear to rival Facebook in terms of actual use. The top few apps at MySpace are reported to have in the millions of active user (9.38 million for the top app, for example). It’s hard to compare to Facebook, since we don’t know how “active users” are measured at each site — the number of monthly active users at Facebook’s top app is around 22 million, but their old “daily active users” measure is more in line with MySpace app usage numbers for top applications. It’s easy to conclude that the top applications are very popular with users at both sites, however.

More importantly, though, according to Offerpal, MySpace apps are converting. “We’re seeing most of our MySpace developer partners earning on average $75 per day for every 1,000 daily active users, with high-engagement apps raking in more than $200 per day per 1,000 DAUs. These numbers are pretty equivalent to what we’ve been paying out to Facebook developers,” said McAllister.

For application developers, it clearly pays to be on every platform you can launch on.