ComScore: Social sites are going global
We sort of knew it already: while Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut, and Friendster were all founded in the U.S., social networking is a worldwide phenomenon. New statistics from ComScore show that sites like Facebook are growing rapidly across the globe, even as that growth slows down in their home country.
Earlier on Tuesday, performance firm Pingdom released numbers pulled from Google Insights for Search, showing that different social networks have very different levels of "interest" across the world. ComScore's numbers, also released Tuesday, underscore the fact that social sites are increasingly global in nature--and sometimes unexpectedly.
According to ComScore's numbers, social-networking sites may be nearing a peak in North America. The industry's foothold in the U.S. and Canada grew only 9 percent from June 2007, but in Asia it grew 23 percent, in Latin America 33 percent, and in Europe 35 percent. And social networks grew a whopping 66 percent in the Middle East and Africa. The 9 percent growth in North America meant that it was the only region of the world where the growth of social networks did not outpace the growth of the Internet-using populace as a whole, which ComScore pegged at 11 percent.
The fastest-growing site is, not surprisingly, Facebook, with a 153 percent increase in unique visitors noted. Most of that growth is international--its domestic growth was estimated at 38 percent. Hi5, a San Francisco-founded site with a big foothold in Latin America, grew 100 percent. Friendster, another Bay Area social network, grew 50 percent thanks to a renewed interest among Asian audiences. Growing at 41 percent is Google's Orkut, at 32 percent is AOL's Bebo, and at 19 percent is Skyrock, a France-based social network that remains extremely popular among the youth in its home country.
News Corp.'s MySpace, still the biggest social network in the U.S., is not doing quite as well internationally. Its unique visitors have gone up only 3 percent year-over-year, ComScore said.
"Facebook has done an exceptional job of leveraging its brand internationally during the past year," ComScore executive Jack Flanagan said in a statement from the company. "By increasing the site's relevance to local markets through local language interface translation, the site is now competing strongly or even capturing the lead in several markets where it had a relatively minor presence just a year ago."
Facebook's internationalization strategy has consisted of leaving the single site intact but allowing members to translate it into the local languages of their choice. MySpace, with its focus more on media consumption rather than communication, has launched several dozen localized editions of the site instead.
MySpace representatives have said that the site's aim is to gain a long-term foothold across the world, not to be a hot global fad. At the same time, it's been engaging in high-profile marketing projects outside the U.S., and at this point it doesn't seem to have produced results yet.
AOL launches two new sites in ad-friendly niches
After letting them gestate in beta for a while, AOL has formally launched two new "lifestyle" sites: entertainment blog PopEater and quirky women's lifestyle title Lemondrop. They're the latest in a series of original blogs that AOL has rolled out, from men's site Asylum to Web meme blog Urlesque, adding to the titles it absorbed when it acquired the Weblogs Inc. network.
Lemondrop is cute, fluffier than Jezebel but a little bit edgier than anything you'd see in the squeaky-clean Sugar Inc. blog network. When I loaded it up, the top story was a rant called "I Miss Making Out," and further down was a gallery of sexy fictional murderers in conjunction with the recent news that the slasher flick American Psycho will be adapted into a stage musical.
As for PopEater, AOL already owns a phenomenally successful entertainment site, TMZ.com, so a new one may look a bit redundant. PopEater, however, looks like it's more Entertainment Weekly than Us Weekly, focused more on how the fall TV season's faring than which celebrity is staggering drunk out of which West Hollywood nigthclub.
But more importantly, both Lemondrop and PopEater are geared toward tasty advertising demographics: young-ish, media-savvy women with enough time on their hands to read entertainment blogs. Like all other AOL properties, their ads are served by the company's Platform-A technology.
AOL is pitching its sites as prime space for advertisers: traffic numbers for these "programming sites" hit an all-time high in August, according to ComScore.
Hitwise: Facebook growing fast, MySpace still on top
The good news for Facebook, according to new statistics from Hitwise, is that its traffic is up 50 percent in the U.S. since last August. The not-so-good news for Zuckerberg & pals? The same numbers say that News Corp.'s MySpace still owns a whopping 67.5 percent of the social-networking market in the U.S.
Hitwise gathered its data from an analysis of traffic to 56 different social-networking sites, and concluded that Facebook has gone from a market share of under 14 percent to slightly over 20 percent in the past year. MySpace, meanwhile, has seen a 10 percent decline in visits, which has pulled its share of the sector down from over 75 percent last year. These numbers, however, were tabulated well before this week's launch of MySpace's music service, which may well boost its traffic.
Behind Facebook and MySpace, Hitwise found that the third, fourth, and fifth most popular social networks in the U.S. are MyYearbook, Tagged, and the AOL-owned Bebo. None of them, however, has yet to bring in more than 2 percent of the U.S. market share.
Facebook vs. MySpace traffic comparisons are popular among data firms these days, with ComScore announcing in June that Facebook had passed MySpace in traffic for the first time. But much of Facebook's growth is overseas, and everyone seems to be in agreement that MySpace is still the top social network in the U.S.
But Hitwise had some more news that might not be so good for either MySpace or Facebook: Visits to social networks overall were down 17 percent from August 2007 to August 2008.
Web 2.0 is one of those terms that resists definition, either because the concept is too amorphous, too pie-in-the-sky to have any real meaning, or because the underlying phenomenon is so huge and important that it will burst the shackles of any attempt to pin it down.
However, the term is everywhere these days, so any language site worth its electrons has to acknowledge its existence and at least attempt a definition. The one above is provisional and may change as Web 2.0 changes.
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