Even on the Web, world dominance must be achieved one country at a time. While Facebook has long been the largest social network in the world, and should soon pass MySpace in the U.S., it is not the largest social network in every country. The map above created by Vincenzo Cosenza resembles more a game of Risk, with Facebook sweeping across the globe from the West.
Using Alexa and Google Trend data, Cosenza color-coded the map based on which social network is the most popular in each country. All of the light green countries belong to Facebook. But there are still pockets of resistance in Russia (where V Kontakte rules), China (QQ), Brazil and India (Orkut), Central America, Peru, Mongolia, and Thailand (hi5), South Korea (Cyworld), Japan (Mixi), the Middle East (Maktoob), and the Philippines (Friendster).
Apparently, Alexa already thinks that Facebook is larger than MySpace in the United States. And Maybe it is, or maybe Cosenza’s isn’t using the best data. But I love being able to visualize market dominance on acountry-by-country basis. I wonder what the map would look like using comScore data, some of which can be found in our recent social network valuation model.
Below is an interactive version of the map.
How can u forget Europes strongest populations??
Germany is the country that pisses Zuckerberg off big time!!
Ireland is shown as facebook?
Everybody here uses bebo. Facebook is only starting to gain adoption. This map is pure NS
Bebo, eh? http://alexa.co...es/countries/IE
Top 2 social networks of each country would make more sense, at least 2 SN in top 10 websites of all kind. And fb is in top 2 in every country in the world!
People who use Alea rankings are the older generation, who in Ireland are the ones who use facebook. Everyone under 20 is on Bebo – those, like my mother and her friends are on facebook.
Though, it seems you are right, as I said, facebook is beginning to gain adoption here http://trends.g...=all&sort=0
Facebook is popular in Pakistan?? It’s an orkut world there where the FBs are just trying to make a niche..
yeah, this map contains some mistakes:
Germany is highly dominated by StudiVZ/SchülerVZ, altough this was originally an exact copy of fb and fb is currently suing them on a few issues. fb entered the german market just a year ago and is growing, but is far from being the dominating network. StudiVZ is also the most popular website in Germany (ok, maybe after google).
It’s base don Alexa and Google trends data – not really reliable.
I can’t believe twitter didn’t take over the lead in any country.
I knew that Orkut is dominating in India. But I am amazed to see that it is not so popular in Pakistan.
[SPAM LINK REMOVED]
Gents,
Aren’t we forgetting Netlog? They have close to 50M members, and at least according to ComScore are leading the pack in a handful of European countries.
Cheers,
S
Yes, Netlog should definately be on this list. I’d love to see a version of the map for mobile social network usage.
@HR I didn’t miss Netlog, as you can see from my post it’s 2nd in Italy, but the map shows only the most popular in terms of traffic
It looks like Myspace isn’t dominating anywhere.
Interesting. It looks like Myspace isn’t dominating anywhere.
Considering that at one point MS was one fifth of ALL internet traffic, long before it became graphics intensive. It was just through the members! I still prefer myspace (and a couple of the smaller names) but not FB – itself soon to be taken over by something new we haven’t seen or heard of yet…
At last a greener world…
http://www.clasilistados.org
…that can’t be right, not a single country is mainly myspace?
This is very interesting. I can’t believe Hi5 is up there, I had forgotten it existed.
http://www.twibeo.com
The FriendFed and Twitter combo.
Twitter’s simplicity.
Photo and Video sharing.
Ban this comment spammer
Ban this asshole with is constant promotion of his/her BS site
There is no need to be rude.
I found this article interesting and informative and it goes to show just how widespread social media has becomein such a short time.
Wow… Interesting. I thought MySpace would still have more dominance.
http://www.twibeo.com
The Twitter-like site that lets you share photos and videos from the page.
Ban this fool
Observers too easily ignore specialized social networks including such holdovers as USENET newsgroups and as recent as neighborhood news publishers. Probably because the press likes to focus on advertising-supported media, the better for its own prospects — or perhaps all it knows to speak about.
The large networks are becoming mainly a matrix in which smaller networks can get started and become organized, but their technical limitations due to massive generality mean that functionally they are mainly dogs, as are their third-party apps.
As clients become servers, the future of networks will become vastly more open and segmented, so that power shifts from the central provider. Then we will see a healthy competition to provide generic platforms for network creation.
This was the dream of Web 1.0 pioneers, submerged in the ecommerce cotton candy of Web 2.0. Now that too is about to pass. More power to the people.
Ditto. Thanks for saying, younger folk need the reminder
What the heck happened MySpace?
oh~ where’s MySpace?
There’s no way Facebook is the dominant social network in Germany. It’s definitely StudiVZ and I would guess MySpace still has more users than Facebook here in Germany.
StudiVZ is going down: http://alexa.co...verzeichnis.com
It sure was big half a year ago. I give it another year but then it’s a graveyard. FB is so much better and everybody is on it.
However, you have to sum up traffic for studiVZ, meinVZ and schuelerVZ. It’s the same network, but with different entry points.
Overall there are definitly still in another world than fb, even if you base your numbers on Alexa/Comscore.
Only thing which is true: that will change. But at the moment it’s nonsens
Interesting Data. I can’t believe Mexico is still dominated by Hi5. We’ll have to see how fast it will be taken over by Facebook.
http://www.twibeo.com
A Twitter with photo and video sharing without leaving the site.
give the spamming a forkin’ rest before you give your site a bad name!
Germany is yet to be taken over by facebook. Facebook is growing, but not close to dominance here.
Orkut is better. It has superb privacy settings.
Orkut is better. It has superb privacy settings.
Stupid TechCrunch doesn’t handle comment postings properly.
The article is not about who’s technically better. It’s about who has more subscribers (aka market share) and therefore can exert greater influence, get it? Who’s stupid now?
Cool many eyes tool. It will be interesting to see this revisited in 5 years.
Wow, so MySpace is only dominant in… Guam. Very cool map, makes me want to play a board game.
Facebook can easily take over the world, and stay for a long time if they keep being innovativ.
Very interesting Post.
Nice to see each country have there own differences about Social Networks.
In a few months we might add the results of Twitter to see how Dominant it is.
Thanks for Sharing
Haha, my country is an empty space on the map!
You see, east of Italy, between Montenegro and Romania. That’s where Serbia should be.
Hilarious!
@Cinger I think it’s a bug in Many Eyes map and Alexa considers only “Serbia & Montenegro”. Anyway what is the most popular SN in terms of traffic in Serbia ?
That bug is also present in Google Analytics. I reported it, and they still didn’t fix it…
It’s either Facebook, or MySpace. There is no real competition from the local social networks.
look at that massive vkontakte.ru croud
This is a very flawed way of looking at Social Networks, as they grow organically through friendships, and then bump into existing linguistic and cultural boundaries. I spoke about this recently at Ignite I/O:
http://bit.ly/socialbigot
I watched the whole 53 minutes of the Google Ignite video at the link you give. 99.999 pure dross. Point people to minute 30 where your 5 minutes start and skip the other 48 minutes.
I quibble with your comment that social networks grow through friendships. That might have been 100% true yesterday but given the explosion of apps, business networking (Lunch 2.0), corp alumni groups, fan groups, SIGs… and enterprise pages (e.g., on Facebook), revenues are driving subscription now.
damn… Skyrock dominates the world??
VKontakte (ВКонтакте) is the best (and biggest) social network in Russia. My friend and I have no reason to move to the Facebook, because all my classmates / friends / ex-girls are in VKontakte already. So you, capitalistic pig, never conquest Russia :]
Lets see in a few months. Countries are falling like dominoes to FB.
Orkut is popular in Brazil & India for sure !!! What about BEBO ????
wow russia is still so big I think they’re gonna take over the world… it’s been long time since I looked at at a world map x)
Russia has 140 million people or so. Mostly in Western Russia
Moscow and St.Petersburg.
Siberia is already populated by millions of Chinese immigrants
So add that Siberia part kindly to China because they will take it totally over in 10-15 years.
The leader in Spain has always been tuenti (http://www.tuenti.com/) Facebook is a closer second with a fast growth, but almost everyone uses both: FB and tuenti. Those who don’t use both are engaged to tuenti.
Look at Google trends, which is more accurate than Alexa:
http://www.goog...=ytd&sort=0
Hi Jack, google trends is for search terms, you have to look to google trends for websites http://trends.g...=all&sort=0
How about some consistency in the data?
Just a few days ago, you released “The True Value of Social Networks” — putting both Studivz AND MySpace ahead of Facebook in Germany… and yet Germany has Facebook as the primary social network.
Which to believe???
Nevermind, sorry.. Alexa/Trends vs. Comscore(!)
Now if you guys could only update that previous chart using this info(!)
You cannot use Alexa to determine the dominant social network. What Alexa is counting is site visited most frequently. It cannot tell you how many members FB or Hi5 have in each country.
Thus like one country I know, Hi5 has over 100K members, and FB has under 70K officially.
However if FB gets more monthly visits than the others Alexa may treat it as if it is the most popular. FB overall may have the most members for a single network worldwide and also most frequently visited. But it is not the most dominant in many of the countries stated here.
Thus this article is total BS and of no real value. Mike I expect better from TC than this crap half baked non scientific analysis
Google Wave will probably make all current social networking plays obsolete within 3 to 5 years. It is not a certainty but definitely a possibility, or, looking from the perspective of Facebook, Myspace, vKontakte, Forticom, Tencent etc, a clear and present danger.
Obviously Google has missed the opportunity to take over the best SN assets while they were still affordable (the way they did with online video), and many of us wondered why Google was so obviously disinterested in pushing Orkut forward.
gWave provides the answer: unable to become a serious player in the SN field in its current form, Google is trying to execute a radical transformation of the field itself, decentralizing rich communication that is currently the core of any successful SN property, thus rendering the current players irrelevant, and apparently hoping to carve a better niche for itself as the dominant social networking protocol/platform provider in the otherwise very fragmented SN world.
Found this map interesting as it relates to Africa. Wrote my thoughts & findings here, http://bit.ly/akyiR.
My Space looks rather vanished from the globe …
“While Facebook has long been the largest social network in the world”
What? Are you serious? If I’m not mistaken there are 3 social media platforms in China that are larger.
QQ is larger than Facebook and two others from China. I think #1 has like ~740 million and the other two are well above 400 million users.
Guess what. They aren’t/weren’t struggling for cash like Facebook either. The top 3 (in the World, from China) are actually pretty solid. Allowing developers to take control over all of the browser screen (where Facebook only allows a restrictive space).
I think you guys should read more about international websites than the U.S. based websites because there is a vast amount of innovation happening outside of our borders. The Chinese are putting us to shame, in more than one category (social media).
But, in full honesty, they aren’t the leaders in tech yet… Their YouTube clone website, literally adds features as it see YouTube changes (copy cat…)
> Guess what. They aren’t/weren’t struggling for cash like Facebook either.
Yeah, that’s the most amazing thing about the Chinese social sites like QQ.
The fact that their users are willing to pay for extra features like clothing for Avatars and stuff like that (of course there are other more useful features as well).
In fact I would say almost 90% of the people I know on QQ actually signed up for their premium account.
It’s fascinating.
care to tell us some of these international sites you are talking about? Would love to check them out
“But there are still pockets of resistance in…”
Are you bloody serious!! You’re somehow assuming that facebook is the best social network! It’s not even the top most (considering number of users).
Typical American thinking — what they is best and other should follow!
Wow. I don’t trust this data especially since is claims that Zing is dominant in Vietnam. I live in Vietnam. Everyone I asked has no idea what Zing is!
The dominant social network in Vietnam would be, hands down: Yahoo 360. People use it here as if their lives depended on it.
@Nathan Thank you, as you can see from my post this map it’s only the beginning of my study so I appreciate you feedback
Many folks are still missing the real social networking value.
Where’s Africa on this map? wtf??
@TheFran Please read this post about Africa by @nebben http://bit.ly/akyiR
The sheer foolishness of this graph is rooted in a presumption that social networks are winner-take-all, monolithic markets. Online social networks have existed for decades, and there’s been one truth throughout: social networks don’t converge, they always break apart and fragment along special interests, etc.
This map may as well have been a chart of national preferences for ice cream flavors.
[offtopic]
The map itself reminds me of Risiko (the game).
face book has a lead in connecting the world
This sort of map based on user numbers is silly, and doesn’t tell the story, except superficially.
The real map that has to be made should show the media companies or software companies or anything-companies that own the servers where this social media perches.
In that sense, the Russian-based Uzbek oligarch who invests in the company that just bought a chunk of Facebook would laugh at the idea that their *other* company V Kontakte is putting up somehow some “resistance”. To what? Himself?
http://ceoworld...ok-200-million/
When you put up a map that shows the OWNERS of social media REALLY, i.e. the people who run the servers and can kick off users for any reason or no reason, then we have a map “of the world” which looks like one of those New Yorker maps with W. 44th street really exaggerated — except this one would show Silicon Valley really exaggerated, I guess, with a very big Moscow looming abroad.
It’s based on Alexa data and Google trends – not really reliable, especially Google trends country data. Alexa is also pretty incorrect in most of the smaller countries.
@Vincenzo Cosenza You missed Netlog completely.
Between 35mio and 50mio people.
http://www.netlog.com
Even in Italian http://it.netlog.com/
Netlog is rather popular in Arabic spoken countries.
@Engago team I didn’t miss Netlog, as you can see from my post it’s 2nd in Italy, but the map shows only the most popular in terms of traffic
In India now Facebook is also getting popular after Orkut. Another Social networking site which is popular in India is http://www.bharatstudent.com
Thank you for your info
I think in South Africa the mobile social network mxit is giving facebook a challenge. Am not sure if comscore and whatever rating system these guys used can rate mobile SNs. I agree though that it should look at number 1 and 2 popular websites
I’m wondering why MySpace doesn’t have friend connect , like Facebook does. There’s alot of potential in MySpace, but they are not harnessing their potential I believe and is therefore losing lots of ad revenue. Not good at all
QQ
LiveJournal is by far the most popular social networking site in Russia. It’s been there since the end of the last century and is used by all age groups. Why Russians have such peculiar taste would require more than a blurb, but generally it has to do with celebrity like status of writers and journalists in Russian society.