Research-Write

Social Networking by the Numbers: Facebook is eating up MySpace, 2nd tier networks led by Tagged

Social Networking has come a long way in 5 years

Back when I first started writing about social networking in 2005, many people had a hard time believing how big MySpace had become. A few of my peers had joined Friendster in 2003 and 2004, but it hadn't changed our lives. MySpace was bigger, but what was with all the cheesy music and glitter graphics? We didn't get it. As educated, upper middle class professionals, we stuck with email, our cell phones, and perhaps joined LinkedIn and tried blogging. The News Corp.acquisition of MySpace for $580 million in July 2005 surprised us. What appeared to be a combination of a trailer park and a high school parking lot on the web was now serious business.

Throughout 2005 and 2006, I worked at Hitwise and chronicled the rise of these "consumer generated media" websites, publishing blog posts and reports on how MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr were changing the web. These trends were summarized in "Year in Review" articles for 2005 and 2006 that I wrote for iMediaConnection. It was not until Facebook, that exclusive social network only for students, opened up in the fall of 2006 that we educated 30- and 40-somethings could truly understand what was so addicting for so many young people. We abandoned all attempts to try to like MySpace, and hurriedly started accumulating friends, connecting with ex-friends, throwing sheep, and poking people. By 2009, our parents joined, our long lost cousins joined, and we had to debate how to handle at least one friend request from someone who was mean to us in high school.

Indeed, Facebook has grown to become one of the most visited websites in the world, with over 400 million users to date. But Facebook is not for everyone: Friendster is now popular in Asia, and Orkut is big in Brazil. Vkontakte.ru is big in Russia. And MySpace is still a top 10 website in the US. On top of that there are dozens of other purely social networks with vibrant US communities, such as MyYearbook and Tagged. There are also many vertically oriented communities that gather users around a specific topic, such as Flixster for movies or Goodreads for books.

Recently I decided to take a look at what's been happening with the purely social networks (not the vertically oriented networks) to get an idea of just how dominant Facebook is, and if there are any other networks out there that still matter. From an advertiser's perspective, Facebook and MySpace have the biggest reach, but secondary social networks have the potential to engage more deeply with their users, since users of second tier brands tend to exhibit unprecedented loyalty -- the "Cult of Mac" is a prime example in this in a still largely PC world.

Here's a look at the data. If you'd like some bullet points or charts to grab, go to my VentureBeat post.

Social Networking By The Numbers, December 2009

View more presentations from LeeAnn Prescott.

Unique Visitors (slide 3)

Examination of US data from comScore shows that indeed, Facebook does lead the social networking category - by a long shot. ComScore reported 112 million unique US visitors for Facebook in December 2009, and 57 million for MySpace. With an estimated active US Internet population of 205 million, that means that 54% of all Internet users visited Facebook in December, and 27% visited MySpace. Bebo was the third largest social network in December, with a unique visitor count of 5.9 million.

Looking at monthly uniques gives us a good idea of how big a website is, but examining the average number of daily uniques gives a picture of how engaged users are with those sites. ComScore data showed that Facebook had an average 37.7 million unique visitors per day, while MySpace had 11.7 million. Facebook had less than twice the unique monthly visits as MySpace in December, but more than three times the daily visits, which means people are visiting Facebook more frequently than MySpace. Looking at visits per visitor (slide 4) puts this into perspective - the average MySpace visitor came to the site 14 times in December, when the average Facebook visitor came 27 times - nearly every day.

Rankings for the second tier sites changed somewhat when comparing monthly and daily visitor counts. Tagged, for instance, ranked #4 with 5.7 million monthly uniques in December, but rose to #3 with 1 million daily uniques. Similarly MyYearbook, which ranked #6 in monthly uniques was ranked #4 in daily uniques. The visits per visitor metric for these sites show that the average Tagged user came to the site 12 times in December and MyYearbook users came 10 times in the month. Bebo, which has a high monthly visitor ranking was low on the daily visitor count, as the average user only came to the site 4 times in December.

Time Spent (slide 4)

According to comScore, the average web visit lasts 27 minutes. Internet users are spending about 1/3 of their web time engaged with a social networking site - the average for the social networking sites in this study was between 5 and 12 minutes, with visits to Facebook right in the middle at 9 minutes.  The sites with the longest visit times were BlackPlanet (12.6 minutes), MyYearbook (11.5 minutes) and Tagged (11.3 minutes). MySpace visits lasted an average of 8.3 minutes. Clearly some sites have the ability to suck their users in more than others, and BlackPlanet and Tagged do a good job of that. Orkut and Friendster don't, possibly because fewer users means fewer people to interact with in any given user's network. 

Growth of Social Networking (slide 6)

Experian Hitwise data on US market share of visits presents a stunning picture of just how important social networking, particularly Facebook, has become in the course of the past year. In December 2008, 5.8% of all US Internet visits were to a custom category of the top 10 social networking sites. By December 2009, that number had increased by 63% to 9.4%. That's nearly one in ten Internet visits ending up at a social network.

When looking at trends in page views, the growth becomes even more compelling - social networking's share of page increased by 83% from December 2008 to December 2009. In December 2009 1 in 4 (25.4%) of page views on the Internet were at one of the top social networks. The much larger share of page views versus visits shows how incredibly engaged users are with social networks, viewing almost five times more pages than on the average website. Anyone who's wasted time looking at pictures on Facebook of people you barely know or haven't seen since high school can understand why the share of page views is so much higher than the share of visits.

Market Share Shifts (slide 7)

The growing dominance of Facebook and the decline of MySpace becomes readily apparent when looking at market share of visits to a closed category of the top 10 social networks. In December 2009, visits to Facebook accounted for 67.8% of visits to this custom category, compared to MySpace's 28.1%. These numbers virtually flip-flopped over the course of just a year - in December 2008, Facebook had 28.6% of visits and MySpace had 64.2%.

With Facebook and MySpace accounting for 96% of total social networking visits in December 2009, is there room left for other sites? Tagged, with 2.1% share in December 2009, was the only site that had more than 2% share. The other 7 sites, while accounting for millions of users, as we saw in the comScore data, together added up to less 2% share.

Market Share Growth and Decline (slide 8)

Overall change in market share of US Internet visits demonstrates that Facebook is truly driving the category growth shown in slide 6. Its overall share of US visits grew by 286% between December 2008 and 2009. The only other site showing overall growth in market share from December 2008 to December 2009 was Tagged, which increased its share of visits by 35%.

Summary

The data doesn't deny that Facebook has come to dominate social networking in the US, and overtook MySpace in 2009. But MySpace's 57 million US unique users are nothing to sneeze at - it's still a top web property with users who are highly engaged. The second tier networks, such as Tagged, Hi5, MyYearbook and Bebo, still receive an impressive 3-6 million uniques per month, and users spend a fair amount of time on those sites. BlackPlanet users spent 3.6 minutes longer interacting with the site than the average Facebook visitor. MyYearbook and Tagged users were on these sites more than 3 minutes longer than the average MySpace visitor. There is definitely addictive behavior occuring on these other sites.

What will enable the second tier networks to stay fresh is features that aren't available on Facebook. Some of these sites make it easier to meet people outside of their own network. They offer different types of social games that can be equally addicting as Facebook's Farmville. And they are beginning to integrate with Facebook - keep an eye out for this later in the year. Facebook Connect is a great way for smaller social networks to extend their reach and draw in new users. The vertical networks have no shame about doing this - Goodreads is integrated with Facebook and Flixster is integrated with MySpace.

There's no denying that Facebook is winning the game thus far - but that doesn't mean another site can't jump in and take over. MySpace's decline is living proof that a major shift can occur in the course of 2 years. But for now, all eyes are on Facebook, while over a quarter of the Internet population is still interacting with MySpace on almost a daily basis, and millions of other users are addicted to sites like MyYearbook, Tagged, and Hi5.

Clichés and Crediblity

I've made a habit of reading white papers and research reports to see how companies write about and position data, and understand how documents can be effectively structured. Writing about data is a tricky business-- what I've learned over the years is that it's best to let the facts lead, and state the conclusions afterward. If a document is written well, the conclusions should be almost self-evident.

Recently I came across a research report in which the findings were drowned in such obtuse language that it detracted from any credibility the report might have had. The fact that much of the data cited as central to the findings of the report were couched in suspicious language such as " the rate was said to be xx%" without any quantitative sourcing did not help the report's credibility, but the cliché-ridden vernacular sent the report over the edge of acceptability in the mind of this data-driven analyst and writer.

Here are some the phrases that were included in the report: "glomming to," "jump on the bandwagon," "faint of heart," "to be fair," "elephant in the room," "one side of the profitability coin,"  and my pet peeve, "the Googles and Yahoos of the world." There is only one Google, one Yahoo, and one Apple, another company often referred to in plural as "of the world." This is the type of language you expect from a slick sales professional. If his product is good enough, you might buy it, but if it's not, you roll your mind's eye and nod along until he's finished speaking. It's not what you would expect to read in an analyst firm's report.

Yes, business writing can be boring to read. Efforts should be made to make it interesting, but what makes for interesting reading is when the audience's interests have been carefully considered, and the relevant data has been highlighted with appropriate language. Analogies included in this report like "inbred family," "advertising buffets," "child prodigy," and "cottage industry,"along with sensationalist verbs like "spawned," and "tantalizing" seem more appropriate for a best-selling business novel with visual cliché cover art.

Not suprisingly, this report was picked apart by online commenters as lacking in data credibility. If the language had not been so inappropriate, the report's methodology shortcomings might have been more difficult to detect.