That’s impressive… but I ask: so what.

Unique users (and pageviews, etc.) are becoming meaningless. What I mean is, the relationship between traffic and revenues are not necessarily linear: for example, The Economist’s uniques rose 39% but revenues only rose 8%.

To give you an example of just how unrelated traffic and sales can be, at my old gig, when I was VP of Sales for a mid-sized publisher, look at my annual revenue figures for the corresponding end-of-year traffic:

Revenues grow over time as you become better versed with what clients look for and penetrate advertisers and marketers decision making process. Month over month, revenues grew even if traffic began to taper off.  Here are my monthly sales for the company:

The lesson for Facebook and MySpace is simple: there is such a thing as having too much traffic.

A marketer is impressed once you hit a certain level, after that point, it’s just diminishing returns.

An investor, however, is impressed once you start to hit certain sales figures, and trust me, it never gets diminishing.

Right now, I could care less who has more traffic, what I care is who is doing a better job monetizing said traffic.