Facebook has become the most popular social network in France, according to the latest figures from comScore. Social networking had a banner year in France, with a 45 percent increase in unique visitors. In Europe as a whole, 211 million (roughly three fourths of total internet users) visited social networking sites.
After Facebook launched a French language interface in February of 2008, the site’s popularity skyrocketed, growing 443 percent over the past year to an estimated 12 million visitors. The native social network Skyrock only grew by a paltry 8 percent (in terms of unique visitors). MySpace ranked fourth on the list of leading social networking sites, with 3 million visitors. This is not surprising, since Facebook has been steadily widening the gap with MySpace internationally.
Worldwide, Facebook had an estimated 221.8 million unique visitors, up from 200.2 million visitors in November, showing an 11 percent growth in visitors. That compares to 125 million unique visitors for MySpace versus 120.7 million visitors in November, a 4 percent increase.
While Facebook is dominating in the global space, MySpace still is at the top in the U.S. But, Facebook’s growth hasn’t stagnated and we think Facebook could be set take the top spot from MySpace very soon.