New social network traffic figures released by Compete show that Fubar, billed as the “first online bar and happy hour” is the fastest growing social network, having increased its traffic by 3,272,217% over the 12 months to the end of February 2008, placing the network at 14th on the list of top 20 social networking sites (chart as shown).
Year on year MySpace hasn’t grown at all, managing to lose 1% of traffic compared to Facebook with 77% growth.
The other big gainers year on year include Ning at 4803% (sneaking in to 20th place) and Twitter with 4368%.
Interesting math… presumably cannot divide by less than 1.0 (being 1 user)..
they are around for years and just renmaed them selfsagain… geez DO YOUR HOMEWORK
Social networks need to figure out what to do once their user base peaks. If they can introduce a strong monetization strategy at that time, they could afford to introduce new developments to insure their don’t lose too many users as they “fall of fashion”
A growth from 202 visitors to 6 610 080 would give a percentage growth of 3 272 217% if I did the math right. In this case it would be more relevant to compare the absolute growth in no. of visitors, i.e. 6 609 878 people in “foo bars” case.
The chart should be for US-based visitors only, doesn’t it?
tim
these aren’t my figures. I’m simply reporting what Compete has release. What homework is there to do, this is what Compete have shown in their graph, I make NO assertions as to why or how this is the case.
To correct myself:
A growth from 202 visits …
… a growth in no. of visits, i.e. 6 609 878 visits in “foo bar’s” case.
i agree. its a stupid title to the post. from 0 visits to 1 visit you get infinite growth. it is interesting how any of the 3 digit growth sites managed to attract these visits. affiliation? banners? adwords? coreg? spam? that is a story not some funny % someone calculated.
Glad to see Twitter is doing good too, fun and useful site.
Duncan, you’re right; they’re not your numbers. But it is *your* analysis of the numbers. Your statement that Fubar is “the fastest growing social network” is quite simply false. That statement didn’t come from Compete (from what we can tell) – that was just bad analysis on your part.
By your logic, if I had a site with a single member this year, and grew to 5000 members next year, then that would mean I’m a “faster growing” website than Twitter!! Wow!
I belive Social networks is a very nice and useful site, I agree Pink’s advise.
Fubar were previously known as cherrytap up until mid July:
http://tinyurl.com/3ymxxt
their traffic has not been growing according to alexa.
MySpace still has more than double monthly visitors and triple the monthly visits of the next one on the list. In fact adding almost all the others’ monthly visitors below MySpace passes it, but not by that much.
Wow… I’ve never visited fubar before, and I think I never will again. How is it possible that people actually use this page? I’ve never seen such bad layout and composition of a site in the past 10 years or so. I don’t get it.
Hi Duncan,
I’m intrigued to see how 2008, “The Year of the Niche Social Network” shakes out as far as these huge generic sites are concerned – will they be able to compete with the newer, niche social networks like Bode Miller’s http://www.SkiSpace.com etc? We’re currently talking with potential advertisers for a site we just launched for the real estate investment community,
http://www.Blac...idowNetwork.com and they’re psyched to gain access to a very targeted membership base.
Burn your TV…. go find a deal,
Richard
Chief Deal Weaver
Great list of social networks
Yes, it must be great to average 4 page views per user per month. Something to be proud of!
Not page views, but visits, but even still, once a week is poor no?
Can we get a few things straight before we get another idiotic post about the “amazing growth” of some random social networking site.
1. The approximate cost of purchasing 4 million “monthly visits” using the marketing tactics that all of these me-too social networks use is on the order of $10,000. $10,000 is more than worth the price of the PR that you get from gullible blogs who then post about how your site is getting huge and should be purchased by News Corp for $10 billion (or at least then allows you to raise money from gullible VCs).
2. Fubar was formerly CherryTap was formerly LostCherry – http://tinyurl.com/3xbg5k – if you look at pageviews their numbers are actually down over the past year.
No doubt these guys are currently running around to VCs and buyout guys trumpeting their amazing non-existent growth, now validated by TechCrunch.
http://girlongirl.ning.com/
“i want to*****and **** her lips also touching sexy her ****s”
wow!
Though it’s fandom, not sel-interest, I need to ping Jay over there and see if MyBlogLog qualifies to be added. I think they’ve got enough monthly visits to bump somebody off the list.
OMG, that site looks worse than MySpace,
side scrolling images, thuosand banners, black background, looks like a 1.0 site made by a n00b.
@ Charlie Prince your totally correct. I know for a fact “foo bar” buy pops from a well known spyware dealer Adon. Ive gotten their pops several times and traced them back to Adon. Its extremely easy to dupe Compete, Alexa etc with “fake” traffic using pops.
Is it fair to include ning in listings like that? It’s more like thousands of crappy social networks set up on one domain
We are a little smarter than this, aren’t we. 32,722,17% growth rate is a USA today number (which is a initial membership of 51 members). At this growth rate they will have 1 quadrillion members (1* 10 ^15) NEXT YEAR!
Anybody heard of a real bar or going out side into the sunlight and talking to what is called a human?
A year in the life of these generic social networks is a lifetime and I think we know that in a year’s time, many of these growth numbers will be negative – although perhaps not fubar – which despite sounding like a children’s TV show – will rule the world by then.
As the proud owner of a specialist social network, one that guarantees privacy by encouraging anonymity (www.bigwhitewall.com), I agree with Richard – here come the social networks that are actually useful…..
So compete isn’t listing imeem in the social network category any more (if it were it would be just above friendster in that table)? just 6 months after naming them the fastest growing social network what is compete.com classifying them as now?
never mind, I’m going back to quantcast.com
What is so great about Social Networks:
http://yooflix....425953206355474
interesting, to say the least
It’s great to see Black Planet in the top 10.
Ugh, I tried “Fubar” I hated it. Was just way too busy for me. And it seemed pretty unstable at times.
I am thinking about getting a Facebook account for my blogs though.
I can get you a solid 5m uniques / month with appropriate reflection on compete and alexa for $13K @ 5 page views per unique on average. Hit me up
Lets keep in mind that Compete tries to triangulate US data only. Many of these networks such as Bebo (which would would probably come in third worldwide) and Xing (a weird ommission on the list) have their prime userbase outside the US. Not to mention Orkut etc. of course.
So from an outside of the US perspective this list is rather pointless
Duncan wrote “these aren’t my figures. I’m simply reporting what Compete has release. What homework is there to do, this is what Compete have shown in their graph, I make NO assertions as to why or how this is the case.”
If you’re not doing your homework and just blindly reprinting information from another website, why don’t you just put in a link and leave it at that? You are redundant.
If those results had been stacked by visitors instead of visits Orkut would have made a real bad showing. As for Fubar! In Holland we have a lot of ‘real’ twitter meetups up and down the country. Real beer with real buddies. We call it twitterborrel and it rocks! Funbar leaves me cold
Wow, that’s f**ked up beyond all recognition! (never heard of it)
Can someone explain to me how classmates.com is #3 ? I thought they died years ago….
@Wade, I see a banner ad for classmates on just about every second website I visit.. so i’m guessing they are still alive and kicking
33. Toffeehead; 19. Charlie Prince – like to hear how you guys think you can deliver that kin dof traffic to a sight for 10k….we are all ears.
Classmates is still alive and strong, and it appears that they’re getting a bigger percentage of people signing up (that have been out of school 10+ years) I’m guessing because of reunions, etc.
That’s my totally unscientific analysis, simply because I see the numbers from my high school steadily increasing (I get e-mails every so often saying 30 new classmates joined… 50 new classmates joined). In years past it used to be drips and dribbles (a couple people at a time joining).
So perhaps the 30+ gen is joining up there to keep in touch old classmates. The crappy thing is though, they give you an e-mail form, so you can e-mail friends, old school mates, etc., with no mention of having to upgrade to a paying subscriber. Once you go through the trouble of typing out an e-mail and hit send, it takes you to a screen asking you to upgrade to a Gold member so the person can actually read the e-mail you sent.
That’s deceptive to me, and an instant turn off. If I had thought of joining, that will never happen now… put that information up front.
…Just my two cents
Duncan–You’re congratulating the wrong site. The increase on Fubar is bogus. This spike in traffic was due to a series of back-end server calls that had nothing to do with user-requested content. At comScore, our first look at the data showed a dramatic increas also, but our QA systems automatically investigate big swings and removed these as part of our standard data production process. Once these were removed, we actually show Fubar as declining, not increasing. Compete and Quantcast have similar issues in this regard–there is a big difference between measuring server calls and measuring an audience. It the intent is to measure the audience, they have this and many other challenges ahead of them. You might want to ask Compete how they handle this issue. While you’re at it, ask them how they handle cookie deletion, another key difference in our two measurement techniques.
I have a feeling they do this on purpose
FUBAR is way too sexual. I feel that people shouldn’t be able to post such graphic pics on there. On the other hand, some of the attributes on there are pretty cool such as knowing who views your profile and shout box.
Fubar is all about the money and “status,” not to mention the countless instances of drama. You’d swear these “adults” acted half their age with some of the antics they pull on there! Despite that, it’s a sadly addictive site and can be a home wrecker if you let it be. If you take a look at the pictures on there (especially of “top members”) you’ll see that they’re grossly over sexual compared to other popular social networking websites. I can’t wait for this site to fall flat on its face. Not that Myspace, Facebook, etc. are much better, but still, the support staff on there is sub-par at best. If you don’t have tits, you won’t get acknowledged. The site’s basically a slut fest, simple as.
Fubar is based off of getting older men to buy special online gifts with real money for scantily clothed good looking women. That is what the whole FUBAR economy is based on. If you are any of the other you are not wanted as shown with recent changes in their system. This is a couple of guys BabyJ and Scrapper taking peoples money in exchange for pixel images women beg for.
fubar ROCKS!!