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Intriguing Trends in Social Networking Growth During 1H 2008
July 27th, 2008
comScore released its June 2008 social networking numbers last week. After taking a little bit of a deeper look at social networking over the past 6 months, I think there are some really interesting trends here:
- Overall, Social Networking total audience grew 64 million (12%) during the last 6 months. (That’s over twice as fast as the total internet audience.)
- Of that, Facebook and hi5 are winning the vast majority of new users coming into the category. hi5 was by far the fastest growing site at nearly 80%, or 25 million uniques, during the period. Facebook grew by the most absolute uniques at 34 million, or 35%. Together, Facebook and hi5 grew by 59 million uniques, accounting for 67% of the growth of the top 6 social networking sites during the first half of 2008 (and 92% of the total category’s net growth during the first half of 2008).
- The next closest in unique terms was MySpace at 10 million, or 10% growth during the period. However, Friendster (7 million uniques/25%), Orkut (9 million uniques/35%), and Bebo (2.7 million uniques/13%) grew at faster rates.
- Facebook is clearly the largest social network in the world by total uniques, at 132 million. MySpace has saturated the US market and is not growing as fast as Facebook and hi5 internationally, where most of the growth is coming from.
- For those that don’t yet know, hi5 is exploding. hi5’s massive 80% growth over the last quarter now firmly entrenches it as the #3 social network in the world. hi5 is the leading social network in 25 countries across Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
- During the first half of 2008, the market became increasingly concentrated amongst the 6 market leaders. Although uniques to the leading 6 social networking sites increased by 88 million, uniques to the other 276 social networking sites in the category actually fell by 24 million from December to June. Despite all the new social networks being launched, it’s proving to be really hard to gain traction at this point.
Update: I think the calculations involving the “Other” bucket are incorrect: the Unique Visitors metric is not additive. Also, the data refers to individual months, not six months at a time.
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July 28th, 2008 at 3:38 am
It would be great if we even get statistics over geographical distances…
this would give more understanding over the popularity or gaining popularity of each application region wise
July 28th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
[...] Inside Facebook » Intriguing Trends in Social Networking Growth During 1H 2008 (tags: trends socialnetworks socialnetworking statistics facebook 2008 bebo myspace) [...]
July 29th, 2008 at 2:10 am
[...] Facebook has been growing by leaps and bounds during the first half of 2008. As of June, Facebook became the largest social network by reach at 132 million uniques, a 35% jump from the end of 2007. (See more overall data on social networking growth in 2008.) [...]
July 29th, 2008 at 5:56 am
Hallo Justin,
I agree with you that the unique visitor is not additive but I can not understand how such a leading company make such a failure. Or is it your calculation? Sorry but I don’t understand if that is a table of comscore or a analysis of you…
Would be nice to get a comment of this!
August 11th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
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August 25th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
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October 8th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
[...] by leaps and bounds in 2008. In June, Facebook became the largest social network by reach at 132 million uniques, a 35% jump from the end of 2007, according to [...]
October 13th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
I used to frequent MySpace but it got boring fast. In the past year I’ve stopped using MySpace and now use Facebook. All my friends seem to be on Facebook as well. I love Erotas Online as well for an adult social networking community.