sites,  Social Networking

The Top Social Networks

January 31, 2009

It seems like I get an invitation to join a different social network every day.  Makes me wonder how much traffic these sites get and what the point really is.  Well, let’s break it down real quick.  Statistics first, the ranking by market share for social networks is as follows:

  1. MySpace -39.37%
  2. Facebook – 17.54%
  3. YouTube – 10.39%
  4. Tagged – 1.55%
  5. Yahoo Answers – 1.36%
  6. MyYearBook – 1.09%
  7. Yahoo Groups – .96%
  8. Meebo – .64%
  9. Yahoo Member Directory – .53%
  10. Bebo – .49%
You might notice a few that you would expect to see in the above list, such as LinkedIn, Classmates.com or others.  That would be because forums are included in the above sites.  If you stick with solely social networking sites, then the statistics break down as follows (Sept. 08), including visitors rather than market share:
  1. Myspace.com – 58,581,000
  2. Facebook – 18,090,000
  3. Classmates.com – 13,313,000
  4. LinkedIn – 4,075,000
  5. Windows Live Spaces – 10,275,000
  6. Reunion.com – 4,845,000
  7. Club Penguin – 3,769,000
  8. AOL Hometown – 7,685,000
  9. AOL Community 4,017,000
  10. Tagged.com – 3,857,000

You may be saying, where in tarnations is twitter.  Apparently they’re at about 2,359,000 visitors.  Overall, that’s a lot of web traffic and a lot of advertising banners.  Another network that doesn’t show up in the list so far is ning, which allows organizations to host their own dedicated social networks.  Given their niche in the social networking market this makes them a rising star, but not quite in the top 10.  

The differences between networks seem to be mostly in the realm of what visitors are looking to get out of them.  However, as social networks mature, they are borrowing features from one another and allowing a bit of integration between networks, primarily by leveraging RSS feeds.

Overall, I am impressed the most by Facebook, who has leveraged an API (FBML) to allow for application development, put logic in place to tailor adds to each person, put logic in place to stop visitors from engaging in open networking (for the most part) while also putting in place ways to connect to people you might actually know.  My first exposure to Facebook was at a school and at that time I couldn’t actually sign up because they had not yet opened it up to non-students.  Since they did open it up it has been great to watch them flourish.  At this point they seem to slowly but surely be catching up to MySpace and deservedly so.

Other rising stars seem to be open networking sites, such as ecademy.com, which allow a visitor to link to anyone in the network.  Oddly enough, one of the best features of the top social networking sites is their ability to keep privacy paramount, although it appears to me at least as though there is a divide in site visitors: those who want to network with absolutely anyone and those who want to keep their networks smaller and more targeted.  It’s an interesting market to watch, but to be honest, one I’m glad I’m not directly involved in…  I prefer to just keep my accounts, integrate them all as much as possible (especially with this site), smile when I see friends from back in high school and college appear on my list of friends and think about how great it is that technology is helping to bring us all together.