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October 24, 2007

Social Site Rankings (September, 2007)

Erick Schonfeld

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Did you know that Imeem is the fastest-growing social site in the U.S (up 1,590 percent in monthly uniques). And that AIM Pages is growing slightly faster than Digg (345 percent growth versus 323 percent)? Well, at least according to comScore. I asked comScore to do a ranking of social sites in the U.S. and then I reordered the list by growth rate. Here it is:

social-sites-by-growth.png

Here are my takeaways. MySpace is still growing at a healthy 23 percent, despite its size. But Facebook is coming on fast, with 129 percent growth. Notice also the strong showing by Bebo (growing 83 percent) versus the lackluster U.S. growth of Hi5 (3 percent) and the decline of Xanga (negative 55 percent).

In blogging platforms, Blogger is beating Six Apart on both absolute numbers (32 million visitors versus 13 million) and growth (55 percent versus 44 percent). In the doldrums territory, you’ve got Windows Live Spaces (with a one percent decline) and Yahoo Groups (four percent decline). And in the you-ought-to-seriously-think-of-shutting-this-down territory, there is Lycos Tripod (23 percent decline), MSN Groups (36 percent decline), and Yahoo 360 (’nuff said).

Here is a more comprehensive list of social sites ranked by total number of visitors. It includes sites where comScore could not calculate a growth rate because it did not have enough data for September, 2006. Some sites that stand out on this list, having come out of nowhere in the past year, include Wordpress.com (with 11.9 million monthly visitors), Freewebs (with 6.6 million), BuzzNet (with 4.4 million),and Kaboodle (with 2.5 million). (Update: Also, you will notice that Google’s social networking site Orkut isn’t even on the list. That is because while it had 24.6 million visitors worldwide in September, 2007, Orkut only attracted 503,000 visitors in the U.S.).

social-sites-sept07.png

CrunchBase Information
Imeem
Information provided by CrunchBase
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. FakeMA

    October 24th, 2007 at 10:08 am

    And I am only on 5 of all the networks listed here

  2. Googler

    October 24th, 2007 at 10:31 am

    watch out for there guys http://www.gruuve.com

  3. Becks

    October 24th, 2007 at 10:35 am

    Where does Orkut fit into here?

  4. Eureka Diary

    October 24th, 2007 at 10:35 am

    Note to self: sign up for these websites to help promote my websites.

  5. Eureka Diary

    October 24th, 2007 at 10:36 am

    This article could also be titled:

    “Website Owners: Spam These Sites”

  6. Jeremy

    October 24th, 2007 at 10:42 am

    Drat. I was hoping the cut off would be lower (eg, you’d look at sites with say, 1 million + uniques. Still, amazing list, we’ll have to monitor Imeem to see if they’re doing anything we want to consider ourselves.

    Over the past 12 months, we (FunAdvice) have grown from 76K uniques in October, 2006, to 1 million this month (October, 2007).

    From my calculations, that’s 1,215.8% growth year over year.

    Would you guys be wiling next month (say, mid november) to do this again? And include all the social networks that are a million + unique visitors, I think that would be very compelling.

    Then, you could also single out those who have VC or angel investments in them & those that don’t :) I think we’d top the list at that point (lol).

  7. Wil

    October 24th, 2007 at 11:03 am

    I think Yahoo needs to buy Bebo. They’ve been priced out of a Facebook acquisition, and I’m dubious how much traction they’re getting with Mash. My guess is that they could pick up Bebo for much less than the $1B they were rumored to have offered Facebook. It may be the #3 social network in the US, but these numbers indicate good growth here and it already dominates in the UK and NZ. Not a bad fit brand-wise, either.

    There was an old rumor to this effect, but that was before Semel was ousted. I’d be very surprised if it’s not on Jerry Yang’s radar.

  8. globalview

    October 24th, 2007 at 11:05 am

    where’s the global view? that’s the compelling story.

    the US accounts for less than 25% of total global internet population!

  9. Mike

    October 24th, 2007 at 11:08 am

    I’d be curious to see what these numbers look globally. Total unique users and growth worldwide and see how it changes the rankings.

  10. Don't click here

    October 24th, 2007 at 11:09 am

    Lycos Tripod has almost 11m daily visitors and you are suggesting it be shut down? Techcrunch only has around 600k visitors, maybe you should consider your options.

  11. RBA

    October 24th, 2007 at 11:11 am

    Do Yahoo Groups users ever step on the web property at all? My wife spends a well 2+ hours a day browsing through Y!Groups emails, writing to the groups, etc. and I don’t think she’s actually visited the web site in months.

    They might not be as unhealthy as these numbers may show, despite being considered a “1.0 social network” by some people.

  12. RBA

    October 24th, 2007 at 11:28 am

    #10 - “Lycos Tripod has almost 11m daily visitors”

    That should be “monthly visitors”, right? Also one should keep in mind these are US-only data, and I have the feeling Lycos is doing better overseas (same thing with Hi5 and others that may not even appear in the list)

    Anyway, where does it say Techcrunch has around 600k visitors/month? I’m not questioning the data, just curious about the source.

  13. Lee

    October 24th, 2007 at 11:49 am

    I’d be curious to see what the advertising revenue is for each but that’s unlikely.

  14. steveballme

    October 24th, 2007 at 11:53 am

    Social, smocial! It’s a fad people!
    It’s cute but that’s about it!

    http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

  15. sanmat

    October 24th, 2007 at 11:57 am

    One thing which is clear from the data is the SN users is growing and that means web 2.0 is getting matured.

    http://blogkatt.blogspot.com

  16. Otis Gospodnetic

    October 24th, 2007 at 12:22 pm

    Yes, indeed, we need global data, not just the U.S. (how last millenium!)

    How come del.icio.us is not there?
    How about Technorati?
    Not considered social?

  17. Daniel Morin

    October 24th, 2007 at 12:45 pm

    What about Friendster. According to Alexa, Friendster.com ranks #15.

  18. Bryan

    October 24th, 2007 at 12:47 pm

    In case anyone is thinking, “where the F did imeem come from?” you can read my blog, which has evolved (devolved?) into an imeem circle jerk. Comments will only encourage my sense of smug satisfaction.

  19. Scrivs

    October 24th, 2007 at 12:53 pm

    Am I the only one that thinks it is silly to use year-over-year growth as a metric for how fast something is growing? A year in the web space is about 10 years for other businesses. Give me last 3-6 month numbers to give a more compelling look at how sites are growing now. You should have crazy growth numbers after a year of having your site online, it only makes sense. How many RSS subscribers does a site get over a year?

  20. Dan Gudema

    October 24th, 2007 at 1:01 pm

    I think if we had a grid of the particular market segment each company serves, the value of advertisign in that market, and the longetivity of the participants, we’d see some temporary markets which will disappear because the users are 15 yrs old and others where the average user is 30 and has a serious spending budget. So, this data does not mean much in the myspace world, where today its hot and tomorrow its not. Let’s see next year and the year after that who’s hot. Probably something not on the list at all!

  21. John Kyle

    October 24th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

    This is very interesting. Do you have comparable data on LinkedIn.com and other professional networking sites?

  22. Nascar

    October 24th, 2007 at 1:26 pm

    It is easy for Imeem to make such big strides in percentages due to the initial lower numbers the previous month. Facebook’s numbers look the best by far in terms of real users growth.

  23. Joe

    October 24th, 2007 at 1:29 pm

    Where’s Ning? Seems like it should be up there. Did it not get put on the list because it technically not its own social network? Seems like its no different then Blogger.

  24. moham polik

    October 24th, 2007 at 1:34 pm

    today - duncan said “Blogs in the TechCrunch network (we don’t link heavily on each page..nor do we have a particularly large network)”

    do you realize EVERY link in this post is to crapbase? who needs pagerank when you can force people to use this dumb directory?

  25. Erick Schonfeld

    October 24th, 2007 at 1:48 pm

    @10, it’s the trend (up or down) that counts, and 600K is just the number of people who subscribe to the TC feed.

    @16, yes this is just U.S. data. Global numbers would turn up another set of sites. My guess is that Friendster would do better on a global list.

  26. David

    October 24th, 2007 at 3:04 pm

    As a clarification, Freewebs is actually 6 years old.

    In 2006, it had 4,452 Unique Visitors in the US, giving 48% YoY growth.

    The reason that this doesn’t come up in the second comScore list above is due to another MediaMetrix annoyance: switching the classification of a site.

    In 2006 Freewebs was counted as [M] (Media?), while today it is classified as [P] (Property?). Unfortunately, MM makes no effort to join the historical data with the current, reclassified site.

    This is also the case for Wordpress (392% growth) and (337% growth).

  27. David

    October 24th, 2007 at 3:05 pm

    Buzznet.com*

  28. Top Myspace Users

    October 24th, 2007 at 4:01 pm

    go see whos most popular on myspace

    http://topmyspacer.com

  29. aniketh

    October 24th, 2007 at 10:34 pm

    Its surprising to see that Orkut had only 503,000 visitors in the US, considering the demographics given out by Orkut (http://www.orkut.com/MembersAll.aspx) stating that the US is no 2.

  30. John McHammond

    October 24th, 2007 at 11:07 pm

    Is it just me, or are there too many companies with meaningless names (IMEEM?) fighting for my online social time?

    Every time I hear about some new site that will “revolutionize” some aspect of my online life, I want to puke.

    Not only do I not have the time anymore to invest into these time wasting sites, either do my friends, who power their very growth. Everyonce in awhile, a friend will get lured by some marketer, to “join the new revolution” of one of these social/viral/ sites. This inevitably ends up in an address book import, an un-authorized spamming of our entire group of friends, with a request to “join sally and MILLIONS of other hipsters” on anothercrapsitewithnorealvalue.com.

    Well, I’m not doing it anymore, and either are a surprising number of my friends. I want my real life back.

    …

    [/rant]

  31. Amit N

    October 24th, 2007 at 11:55 pm

    This is a really cool report, I did not knew about the site that featured on #1 on the report. I was thinking the Digg will be on #1. But this really comes as a surprise to see that many social sites coming up fast.

  32. Ed

    October 25th, 2007 at 7:42 am

    Good info! Helps show the trend so you know where to be.
    Grace and Peace,
    Ed

  33. jalex

    October 25th, 2007 at 8:04 am

    know what? this post of yours made me sign up to imeem and facebook.

  34. ProHipHop

    October 25th, 2007 at 10:37 am

    I’m seeing a lot of bands and publicists using Imeem but I don’t know how big such sources are for growth.

    In terms of music marketing, MySpace and YouTube are the biggest sites and Imeem probably comes in third, just at a much smaller scale.

    Facebook and most everybody else of any size has little to no presence in that space. Niche networks do, however, and we’re seeing more such networks and related 2.0 services focused on music marketing.

    A lot of the Facebook news has come from the second wave of members, the business community. Some folks have been watching where the former college kid Facebook members have been moving. It would also be interesting to keep an eye on where the bands go as new networks develop because music is a strong driver in this space.

  35. Ben Strackany

    October 25th, 2007 at 1:01 pm

    I think below a certain traffic threshold, growth % can vary widely & doesn’t matter as much. It’s like penny stocks.

    Otherwise I could launch a site tomorrow and grow its traffic by 1,000% in a month (from 1 user to 1,000 users) with some link & ad buys.

    I noticed that imeem is at (almost) the bottom of the list in terms of traffic, so that big growth % could be partly explained by an initial growth spike or marketing push.

    And while imeem is up a lot over the year, they’re down by at least 30% over the past three months (per compete.com). So is it possible that they’re already a fading star?

    Lastly, I agree that the focus & takeaway should be more on the larger properties — 20-30% changes when you’re pulling in millions of visitors is a big shift.

  36. susan

    October 25th, 2007 at 11:06 pm

    The thing about Six Apart and ComScore is it only captures traffic that they host. And I believe it probably doesn’t capture pages such as comment pages? But I’m just guessing on that one.
    Don’t forget they also have MoveableType that they don’t host. That number isn’t anywhere reflected in ComScore and from what I know that’s a huge portion of their business.

  37. Horoscop

    October 26th, 2007 at 11:48 am

    Wow.. thanks for these ranking’s info :)
    @29 aniketh : it’s really strange :-|
    @Don’t forget Orkut was buy by Google

  38. Michael Myers

    October 29th, 2007 at 4:38 pm

    Erick - Do you have any stats on mobile social networks?

  39. Joris

    October 30th, 2007 at 9:22 am

    Superb info!!

    I am working on my scripture, its all about social networling sites and this was just the info i was looking for!! Thanx

    I’m making this scripture for my interm ship company

    http://www.whoozz.com

    The goal of my reseach is getting whoozz.com in this website list!

    Lets hope whoozz.com will be in top 10 if they follow my advise!! LOL

    thanx for the info

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