By the numbers: Social networks
By Chris Gaylord | 07.16.08
It’s hard to describe the massive success of online social networks. Every month, Facebook and MySpace attract millions of new users. And every time I boot up my computer, it seems there’s a new competitor vying to steal away their audience.
To put this growth industry in perspective, here are ComScore’s June web traffic figures, courtesy of BusinessWeek.
62.3 percent of Americans visited at least one online social network during the past year. By contrast, 42 percent of Americans voted in the 2004 presidential election. That’s not quite a fair comparison – many of the people who use social networks are too young to vote. But the difference is enormous: 189.9 million on social networks; 122.2 million voted.
37.4 million unique visitors surfed to Facebook.com in June. That’s more than the entire population of Canada (33.2 million), and a 5 percent bump over May’s numbers.
72.8 million unique visitors headed to MySpace.com last month – more than Canada and Spain combined.
11 hours and 17 minutes is how long the average American MySpace user spent on the site over the past 3 months. Facebook users spent just under 9 hours cruising from profile to profile.
2nd largest online social network is Blogger, followed by Facebook, WordPress, and Flickr. (MySpace is the big cheese.)
141 percent more Americans visited the business networking site LinkedIn since June 2007, inflating its US audience from 1.7 million to 4.1 million.
9.5 million new visitors checked out Facebook during the past year – a 34 percent jump. Imagine all of Sweden (9 million people) getting the urge to try out Facebook.
Next week, the Monitor will attempt to answer the difficult question, “do social networks actually make any money?” Stay tuned.
[Via BusinessWeek]
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1. Sean B. | 07.16.08
it’s one thing to “visit” a social network during the past year, but it’s another to be a regular user of social networks, which would probably just be a small fraction of “62.3% of Americans”. Voting for the president is more of a serious, involved commitment than typing myspace.com in a web browser.
Another thing to ask is what percentage of those “unique visitors” (IP addresses I imagine?) are indexers, spambots and other AI, along with the same users redundantly logging in home, work, school, wireless, etc.
I don’t doubt that social networking is big deal, but I can’t help but be skeptical about vague and hyperbolic usage stats like these. Usually the number of regular users (e.g. logged in for more than 5 hours in the past two weeks, or however you want to measure it) are a more telling statistic as opposed to “unique visitors”.