Despite frequent claims of being over-hyped, social networking sites still comfortably claim 3 of the top 10 spots world-wide on Alexa (as of September 9, 2007) and their growth shows no sign of slowing down.
According to ComScore, the top 6 Social Networking Sites (Myspace, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut and Bebo) grew between 56-270%, between June ’06 and June ’07. Five of those top 6 were ranked in the 16 highest Alexa sites globally as summarized below:
The unique user numbers for those sites range between an
impressive 18 and 114 million, but where those users come from tell a more
important story, especially when it comes to monetizing those eyeballs.
According to Alexa more than 40% of the Myspace and Facebook users come from the US and the UK. Compared to those two leading sites, Hi5 seems to be getting most of its users from South America, Friendster from Southeast Asia and Orkut from Brazil. Out of the trailing social networking sites, Bebo is the only one that drives 83% of its traffic from English speaking countries:
In addition to monetizing traffic from emerging countries and
non-English speaking visitors, the largest social networks will also have to
deal with strong entrenched local players like StudiVZ in Germany. But there’s
still huge value in dominating a key region or demographic like the Spanish
speakers or Southeast Asia.
Case in point is the Hispanic Market. According to Lee Vann, CEO of Captura Group as quoted in Juan Tornoe’s Blog on Hispanic Trending: “The U.S. Market is growing at about 1 percent whereas the Hispanic market is growing at about 15 percent each year. $16 billion a year is spent on Internet advertising in the U.S. Only $150 million of that targets Latinos. But more users could mean more ad revenues.”
