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Social Networking Marketshare Update

Two things crossed my e-mail last week that I found interesting.
First, Hitwise release their latest survey of the market share of the major social networking sites.
MySpace Receives 79.7 Percent of Social Networking Visits
Facebook Traffic Doubled Since Opening up in September 2006


NEW YORK, NY – May 21, 2007
– According to Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service, MySpace continued to dominate the social networking category in April 2007, with 79.7 percent of category visits. Following MySpace was Facebook with 11.47 percent of visits and Bebo with 1.28 percent of category visits. US Visits to MySpace increased by 70 percent from April 2006 to April 2007, while visits to Facebook were up 126 percent and visits to Bebo up 184 percent in that period.
Facebook opened up to accept Internet users without a school affiliation in September 2006. Previously it had been limited to those with a college or high school email address. From September 2006 to April 2007, the market share of visits to Facebook grew by 106 percent.
One in four visits (24.9 percent of upstream clicks) to the 19 other top social networking sites came directly from MySpace in April 2007, demonstrating the dominance of MySpace and indicating that many users maintain more than one social network. In April 2007, Facebook accounted for 2.85 percent of the upstream traffic to its 19 competitors, an increase of 185 percent compared to September 2006.
“Opening up to the entire Internet audience had a positive effect for Facebook” said LeeAnn Prescott, director of research at Hitwise. “Clickstream data indicate that users at other social networking sites may be experimenting with Facebook as an alternative site, which may help it attain critical mass among non-collegiate users.”
Market Share of US Internet Visits to Top 20 Social Networking Sites
April 2007
Rank Name Domain Market Share
1 MySpace www.myspace.com 79.70%
2 Facebook www.facebook.com 11.47%
3 Bebo www.bebo.com 1.28%
4 Imeem www.imeem.com 1.03%
5 BlackPlanet.com www.blackplanet.com 0.87%
6 Tagged www.tagged.com 0.84%
7 Yahoo! 360 360.yahoo.com 0.71%
8 Xanga www.xanga.com 0.69%
9 hi5 www.hi5.com 0.58%
10 Gaiaonline.com www.gaiaonline.com 0.58%
Note – data is based on a custom category of 20 of the leading social networking websites ranked by market share of US visits, which is the percentage of traffic to the site, based on the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users. The percentages represent the market share of visits among the websites within the custom category.
Source: Hitwise”
Second, my hometown seems to be a Facebook hotbed! It was widely reported in the local press that Torontonians are twice as likely to be on Facebook. Hmmmm. How will that be spun with our national inferiority complex?
Stephen

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Posted on: May 22, 2007, 6:17 am Category: Uncategorized

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