In the global race to be the top social network, MySpace and Facebook are neck and neck. In January, 2008, MySpace was still the biggest social network worldwide with 109 million unique visitors, according to comScore. But Facebook was close on its heels with 101 million. (Meanwhile, the data in the U.S. for Facebook at least shows a possible slowdown in growth).
While MySpace and Facebook are fighting it out for the top spot, back in the second pack some interesting sprints and scuffles are going on that are worth keeping an eye on. Everyone in that second pack (Hi5, Freindster, Orkut, Bebo, Imeem) are about a third to a quarter the size of the leaders in terms of worldwide unique visitors, so I’ve isolated their performance in the chart above (it is harder to see if you include Nos. 1 and 2, MySpace and Facebook).
In January, both Hi5 (No. 3, in red) and Friendster (No. 4, in blue), made moves to pull away from Google’s Orkut (No. 5, in green) and Bebo (No. 6, in yellow). The latter two maintained a more steady pace. Coming on strong from behind is Imeem (No. 7, in purple), which surpassed Multiply (No. 8, not shown). The chart below has most of the stats, except for the last two—Imeem had 17.8 million global visitors in January, 2008, a 477 percent annual growth rate (Multiply had 17.6 million, a healthy 203 percent rise from the year before).
For Hi5 and Friendster, global growth is a major part of their game plan. Friendster, for instance, which dropped off the radar for most of us in the U.S., is now the single largest social network in Asia. It’s top five countries are the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, the United States (legacy members who never left, plus new growth among Asians here), and Singapore. Friendster has kept its growth going by launching fan profile pages for Asian pop singers, launching four new languages since September (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish), and letting developers create apps for its site.
So does that mean that Friendster and Hi5 are worth more than the $1 billion Bebo is rumored to have sold itself for? Not necessarily. It depends on the actual composition of their members, click-through rates, and other financial factors. Generally speaking, advertisers like to target their campaigns by geography, and pay less for ads that target populations with lower per-capita spending power than in the U.S., Japan, or Europe. So not all members are worth the same to advertisers, and thus to potential acquirers. But as social networks become saturated here in the U.S., everyone will have to look overseas to keep growing.
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interesting analysis - love reading international stories and in the last 3 days, I’ve received 10 friendster requests - which caught me off guard honestly.
this goes along with the stats released from Google in December about the top rising search terms… some of our faves are on the list including Badoo and hi5 along with eBuddy on IM and DailyMotion on video:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....arch-terms
I think the geography here gets interesting:
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/info.....297,0.html
MySpace / Facebook own(z) the U.S.
Brazil is Orkut territory.
As Erick says, Friendster in southeast Asia.
Bebo is very strong in UK/Europe.
LiveJournal occupies the 42 time zones in Russia.
One thing that the data does not show is…
How many of the same people are visiting more than one Social network regularly.
It would not be surprising that MySpace and Facebook overlap in terms of those having account on both sites
I’d like to see this chart, but with visitors weighted by average HHI in that country. A visitor is not worth the same, in terms of the ability to monetize, as other visitors. Having a huge amount of Thai and Phillipino visitors is great if you’re in those countries, but it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to monetize at the levels that sites popular in Europe and North America can.
great point Harold.
Global sans China?
Indonesia for Friendster!
Great post Erick. I hadn’t realized how these other social networks were growing so rapidly as normally all that’s in the news is MySpace and Facebook. Friendster’s turn-around is especially surprising after the turmoil they had for many years. Read Inc magazine for the great back story on how screwed up management became there.
I was wondering what others’ opinions were on which social network will have the most attractive users for advertisers? I would think it would be Facebook since they have the 18-25 market that advertisers look to target as well as a lot of even older users with much of that in the US. They’ve had a lot of trouble though with getting attractive click-through rates and responses to their ads as has MySpace.
I’ll bet on Hi5. They already have huge numbers and are positioned to dominate ALL Latin America (excluding Brazil)…
Great analysis. Interesting to see that Friendster still has some power over in Asia. We remember when they were number one in the US!
Agreeing with one of the comments above, it would be interesting to see how many active members both Facebook and Myspace has to see if Facebook actually wins in terms of those users. It would be safe to say that maybe 1 out of 100 profiles on Myspace is inactive. Many people create multiple accounts on there as well (unlike Bebo and all of those we can assume). Either way, Myspace and Facebook will always be king in the industry since even better platforms have come up but due to over saturation in the US, those two have ultimately gained complete control - giving the Orkut’s and Hi5’s no chance to truly catch up - at least not in this country!
Is xanga really not up there at least in Asia??
what about linkedin? And is xing not big in Europe??
It’s interesting to watch the top players duke it out with each other. From my experience with my site http://www.20dc.com it is really fun to see who grabs positions in the niche political social networking scene. It would be fun to see what niche sites are duking it out with each other in a bunch of different genres. Article idea TC?
http://www.odnoklassniki.ru and vkontakte.ru are the largest social networks in Russia and Ukraine. Together they have around 20 million unique visitors per month.
According to quantcast today
“Imeem Network is a mega destination that reaches over 145 million monthly uniques, of which 53 million (37%) are in the U.S.”
http://www.quantcast.com/p-03Kgz0RV6Ztmc
I think that’s a glitch on quantcast to be honest.
but imeem clearly aren’t so desperate for ad revenue, today they’ve replaced one of the front page ads with a ‘happy birthday’ message for imeem CEO Dalton Caldwell.
I think Orkut is cathing up real fast .. it is already a big hit in india, brazil and ofcource it is backed by google.
I have accounts on Orkut, Myspace, Hi5 and Facebook but the only one I enjoy is Hi5. I find Hi5 very international and enjoyable. I actually think Hi5 will become the biggest social network over time. I also think Hi5 will actually be a good fit for Google.
imeem is a social network?
Nothing against imeem, but I don’t see how fits into that category. Sure, it includes some social features, but doesn’t everything nowadays? Why not throw Flickr, Last.fm, or YouTube into the running?
The rest of the article makes sense. I was just confused by imeem’s inclusion.
imeem started out as a client centric IM based social network (hence the name imeem) with all the usual social network trappings - friends, links, blogs etc etc the media hosting and sharing features that its best known for were added later, but the social features never went away and stand up well in comparison to other social sites.
Flickr, last.fm and YouTube started out doing other things and then added social features later, but you can still see the gaps where these things intersect with the basic feature that drives the site.
Many people only think of imeem as ‘youtube for music’ but it does video, photos, blogs and other stuff on top of the core social networking features.
Any implications about cross usage of networks? How many members on Bebo are also members on MySpace, etc.?
I vaguely remember that I have seen a cross-usage matrix a while back… Can anyone help?
@ Martin. I had the same question. I think the demographic that uses these networks also uses a number of them.
Here’s a link to an overlap chart:http://blog.compete.com/2007/11/12/connecting-the-social-graph-member-overlap-at-opensocial-and-facebook/
Why can’t I access those figures on comescore.com? The most recent statistics are from June 2007.
Does anyone know if the 810 million page views relate to total internet page views, or total social network page views?