Orkut is an incredibly active community. I’m happy to send an invite to anyone who wants to check it out. jenboro@gmail.com

Michael,

With all due respect, you are doing our entire industry a disservice by posting misleading analysis like this.

I wouldn’t make such a strong statement if it weren’t the fifth time (that I have read) that you and your employees have made the same *exact* mistake.

The data that Alexa collects is WORLDWIDE.
The data that CommScore published is US ONLY.

Is it so hard to understand the concept that there are more people outside of the US than there are inside of it? And that as popular as MySpace is in the US, Orkut could *gasp* actually be MORE popular than MySpace in several other large countries?

I’m honestly baffled why such a simple concept is so frequently eviscerated here on TC. Unfortunately, the loyal readers digest your inaccurate analysis with aplomb, and “Alexa’s numbers are inaccurate” is the conclusion a lot of people draw.

It’s not MySpace’s UI. It’s not Alexa’s inaccuracies. The main explanation for this “contradiction” is that YOU ARE COMPARING APPLES TO ORANGES.

I was referring to this ajaxworld magazine article comparing blogger.com to myspace.com, using only alexa data: http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/267061.htm

critiqued pageviews in general, in the context of modern rss and ajax tech.

just for reference’s sake…

@ peter, no offense but alexa sucks.

WEB 2.0 VIRILITY MODEL

I have developed a model to strategically assess the virility of a web 2.0 concept / business model.

The reason web 2.0 has been so successful is the ability for people to share content. We typically credit social sharing for the virility of a website. After investigating, many successful, less successful, and unsuccessful web 2.0 website, I’ve developed a model to assess how viral a concept will be based on what is shared and how it is shared. This model operates holding everything else constant.

Read about my model at the Next Intuit blog.

http://www.nextintuit.com

for the record, the current (undated) demographics from orkut are below. it’s my personal impression that US-based early adopters have by-and-large long-since abandoned the site.

1. Brazil 62.30%
2. United States 14.17%
3. India 10.74%
4. Pakistan 1.74%
5. Iran 1.14%
6. United Kingdom 0.70%
7. Japan 0.52%
8. Portugal 0.45%
9. Canada 0.43%
10. Mexico 0.40%

@ Patricia, no offense, but so do all of the other ratings services. The degree to which they suck varies depending on what type of accuracy is important to you, however I haven’t found that on a large scale that any of them suck any more or less than the other.

^ agreed. i just read a good business week article about it. makes me wish i could find a solution - i bet a lot of people would invest in it

Hi, this article totally crosses a portion of a post I have worked on the last couple days and although I usually hate when people do this below is a link to the post. All I can say in defence of my actions are it is related and hopefully ads value to this conversation.

Orkut - the undiscovered country, or is it?

What about hi5.com?

Ref: the post from Eric above, here is another similar http://www.go2web20.net/
Seems Web2.0’s exponentials will be harder and harder to measure.

Social Networking is such a funny term. All of these “Social Networking” sites are nothing more than web based AOL’s.

It is genius really (well, that is obvious). Everyone always ripped on AOL…but when you call it by another name…

Orkut, Myspace, all of them…they are just crappy versions of AOL. It’s funny.

^ crappy, but free.

I really feel the need to second what peter said in 52. While alexa data might not be perfect using comscore, US only data, to compare international sites and draw any form of conclusion is very misleading journalism and not the kind of thing I expect from TC (and particularly Michael).

and the techcrunch community in orkut is:
http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=22932071

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

I second Chris in that I cannot believe a highly respected site like TechCrunch is comparing US-only data with global data!

Comscore does measure international but those are not the numbers represented here. This is just for US I assume?

But I am curious as to why other sites, including Windows Live Spaces which has around 10M users according to Comscore, were not included in the post?

^^^ It is a little bit of a bizarre group here, for what it’s missing. … I think?

Good to see the comparison chart. Man one billion page views a day is an eye popping figure.

Talking abt myspace what jumps up to the forefront of my mind is the recent finding that a lot of phishing attacks are targeted at myspace. According to Kevin Beecroft of mashable labs there are almost 3000 phony pages there used for phishing purposes. With popularity comes people using these sites as a target be it yahoo or myspace. Recently one page that was used for phishing was spotted by myspace and taken off.

By the way if anyone interested in reading an article I recently wrote which covers all aspects of phishing attacks and how to protect onself from it you can read it at

http://infopowered.blogspot.co.....about.html

Now with all the phishing attacks even the most common net user has to stay guarded.

i’d be more inclined to believe that 3000 phony pages are created *an hour* than that there are 3000 total.

fyi, i think friendster probably does 1 billion monthly page views and tribe around 35-40 million with 1.4 m monthly uniques.

Replying to #52, 64, 67, and others:

Just to set the record straight, comScore does indeed observe traffic both globally and in the U.S.

Here are some related data for September 2006:

Worldwide Traffic (15+)
—————————–
MySpace — 78.3 million unique visitors
Orkut — 15.7 million unique visitors

Latin America
—————–
MySpace — 2.7 million unique visitors
Orkut — 10.3 million unique visitors

To clarify the last post, both worldwide and Latin America are observing unique visitors aged 15+.

Ok I know this post is kind of old but I was doing some research and find something very strange about your data. By Comsscore’s numbers Orkut gets 198M pageviews yet only has 351K users. This means that the “average” amount of pageviews an “average” single user goes thru per month is 564 pages. That is freaking obsurd considering the average pages per user average is 2.5 pages. Only way this data would be misqued is that Orkut makes 10 page requests per pageload but even at that rate still hard to imagine 564 pages per user.

Also Comscore only tracks USA users (a large portion of Orkut is foreign) on a Nielsen based system so they grossly under report. I tried Comscore once and knew for a fact I was getting 900k page views per month but by their “estimates” I was around 300k page views when 60% of my traffic is USA based.

Hopefully someone follows up besides me on this

Take it easy,
PK

i think that myspace is a cool website

Why do so few rounds-ups of social networking include Blackplanet.com? It has 2.5million uniques and 500million page views a month. according to Hitwise it is the 4th largest social network in the world!!

It was founded 7 years ago.

Yes, orkut is growing like anything, now its become symbol of social marking.

I agree with you orkut server down more then eight hour today.

Its interesting to see that Google owns orkut and is promoting all pages with its rankings extremely high. Its unclear even as we embark on the year 2009 what will become of even google with current stock price less than $300 today finally. With tough economic times its clear that social networking will be the speak easy of the 21st century. As people lose their jobs they will log on line and find peace in orkut or myspace.