Social Networking Sites Expand Global Reach
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Written By Drupad Sil | August 1, 2007 | Share This
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Internet marketing research company comScore today released a study that reveals the dramatic global expansion of several major social networking sites.
In terms of total unique visitors in June 2007, MySpace.com was far and away the number 1 with 114 million. Facebook.com was a distant second, at 52 million unique visitors, followed by Hi5 (28 million), Friendster and Orkut (24 million each), Bebo (18 million), and Tagged (13 million).
The raw numbers, however, don’t tell the entire story. Looking at growth over the past year, from June 2006 to June 2007, Tagged posted a 1774% increase in unique visitors (1 million visitors last year vs. 17 million today). Facebook posted the second largest growth, up 270% on the year from 14 million last year, followed by Bebo at 172%. The remaining four grew between 50 and 80%, but all told the seven major social networking sites averaged 212% growth. Not a bad number.
Another interesting metric to examine is the popularity by global region. Facebook (68% of users) and MySpace (62%) were both skewed heavily to North America, while Bebo (62%) drew most of its support from Europe. Orkut (48%) is predominantly popular in Latin America, while Friendster (88%) relies heavily on Asia for its user base. Hi5 and Tagged were much more balanced than the other five, garnering at least 8% of their user base in each global region.
So, what conclusion can we draw from these numbers? Dan Farber at ZDNet has some ideas:
“The more important metric on the business front is how much time those millions of unique users across the globe are spending on the social networking sites, their demographic profiles and the the level of ad targeting that can be applied. This is the new frontier, the people-centered Web, which marketers will find increasingly attractive as a way to profits. The politics of the people Web–allowing users to be more in control of their profile information–has yet to be fleshed out, however. If Amazon is a worthy guide, the social networks will follow suit with more personalization and recommendation engines.”
The most interesting thing about this report is the correlation between physical communities and online networks. We’ll have to watch the global growth of social networking sites and see if they can traverse the cultural and geographic barriers of users online.
Topics: International, Social Media, Web Analytics |
I dont think social networks will have a hard time finding advertisers. Social networks account for 40% of time spent on the internet.