The Compete blog has posted February 2008 site visit statistics for the top 20 social networks in the US – February Top Social Networks – Make way for the new guys. I thought I’d have some fun with graphics. The statistics for monthly site visits make for a great long tail:
Using bubbles to represent relative size vs growth: (Note: fubar.com has been removed as it skews the graph too much, with 3.2m% growth. Just picture it waaaaaay to the right of Twitter and Ning with a fractionally larger bubble than Twitter)
Myspace might have negative growth (at -1%) but it is a fair bit bigger than its nearest rival. Of everybody else, Twitter, Ning and Fubar stand out for their significantly higher growth rates. The number of unique site visitors is also a long tail but with a little more wiggle in the tail:
And that wiggle shows up some interesting statistics. Orkut has an average of 15 visits per visitor whilst Flixster has an average of 2. They both have roughly the same number of monthly visits. Twitter and Ning have a similar number of monthly visits and a similar growth rate (significantly larger than everyone else bar Fubar). But Twitter has twice the number of visits per visitor… Here’s the complete breakdown:
Only three sites (shown in red) have a ratio of more than 10:1 in terms of visits to visitors. The rest range from 1.5 to 6.6. The first two sites – Myspace and Facebook – account for 88% of the monthly visits to the top 20 sites. The third member of the 10+ club – Orkut – is Google’s social network. (It used to be invite-only but I just checked and it’s now open.) Classmates is the third most popular site in terms of visits yet has the second lowest ratio of visits to visitors (1.9:1). Fourth-placed MyYearBook has a ratio of 6.6:1. If I were an invester, I think I’d prefer sticky eyes to many eyes.
[Update] Just spotted in the comments on the Compete blog post, the statistics used here are for US site visits and visitors only, they are not world-wide (Orkut is huge in Brazil, Bebo is big in Europe).
Source: Compete – http://www.compete.com/; Statistics – http://blog.compete.com/2008/03/07/top-social-networks-traffic-feb-2008/
Technorati Tag: The Long Tail; Social Networks
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