The horse race between social networks’ traffic data are a popular blog post topic and tend to get a decent amount of attention but I’m almost always left feeling like I’m only getting a small piece of the picture. Therefore, I’ve decided to dig into Compete.com and put together a few graphs that show the changing social networking landscape … and uncover some interesting trends in the space.
A couple of points on the metrics I’m using.
- Coming from Compete.com these are figures from United States browsers only. This will explain how a website like Orkut, with huge audiences in Brazil and India, doesn’t even make it into the top 20 (its #21 actually).
- Another issue with Compete.com is that they only measure web browser traffic – and do not capture any taffic that comes from other desktop applications of mobile devices. This is most likely to negatively affect the traffic numbers of Twitter (although those figures are still quite good) because Twitter gets a significant portion of its activity from mobile and 3rd party desktop applications.
- I’ve decided to use Monthly Visitors as the basis of comparison rather than Monthly Unique Visitors. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, several of the websites that rank high on the Monthly Unique Visitors ranking like #3 Classmates.com and #4 Reunion.com get a considerable boost in traffic from their ad buys but rank near the bottom in terms of engagement / unique visitor. Therefore I thought it was more meaningful to recognize social networks seeing large organic growth (like Twitter and Ning) who aren’t getting their traffic by paying for it.
Okay … lets get started:
First, I think its well known that two social networks dominate the category … and this is certainly backed up by the numbers. Facebook (the new #1) and Myspace get nearly 83% of the visits to the top 20 sites. That really is getting close to duopoly territory.
In fact, when I was putting together the trend chart over the past year, I had to break the chart in two because Facebook and Myspace were so dominant, you couldn’t see any changes in #3 – 20. So, the big story … Facebook passed Myspace in December and doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of giving up the #1 spot in the near future. In fact, Facebook, with nearly 1.2 billion visits in January, has opened up a lead of over 380 million visits just two months after overtaking the top position. To put that in perspective, Facebook’s lead, if it were a social network of its own, would rank #7. Meanwhile, Myspace had just over 810 million visits in January – more than 80 million fewer than they had the year before:
As for the rest of the top 20, there are plenty of fascinating stories here as well and none of them bigger than Twitter. One year ago Twitter would have ranked near the bottom of this list with just over 4 million visits but has seen steady massive growth to take the top position in Social Network not named Facebook or Myspace by receiving over 54 million visits in January. To me, this more than explains the Fail Whale phenomenon.
In what is, to me at least, somewhat of a suprise – Flixster comes in at the #4 position by holding onto most of its massive traffic gains (perhaps due to “Aggressive Viral Marketing Practices” ) from the Summer of 2008 and receiving over 53 million visits. Rounding out the top 5 is LinkedIn with just under 43 million visits in January – a near tripling of traffic from a year ago.
It is also interesting to have a look at the relative winners and losers of this group. I’ve already mentioned the massive growth of both Twitter and Ning in the past year (ranking #1 and 2 respectively in visitor group among the top 20). However, on the less fortunate side of the ledger is Yahoo360 and Bebo. Both are the property of large media companies (Bebo had the good sense to wait until they were acquired by AOL to tank) and they rank #1 and 2 respectively in traffic loss – losing over 40% of their visitors each from a year ago.
Finally, having a look at engagement. There are a lot of figures that we could use to measure the levels of engagement for each of these sites – and I believe its a meaningful thing to measure because several of these sites get lots of visitors through active marketing programs but do a poor job of engaging the visitors when they get there. I’ve decided to go with Visits / Unique Visitor. This does sell short the types of social networks that people tend to leave open for extended periods of time and those that users tend to engage with through applications other than their browser but its a useful metric nonetheless.
Facebook has the most unique visitors in the month of January and the most Visits per Unique Visitor … hence its massive lead over the rest of the Social Networking world. Myspace, My Yearbook, Twitter and Tagged are also sites that do a great job at getting their users to come back several times each week on average.
On the other end, Classmates and Reunion, despite their massive advertising spend and, at the very least, questionable marketing practices do a poor job at getting anyone to come back (the aggressive collection of data and solicitation for subscriptions can’t help).
Looking at year-on-year trends in this category, Facebook wins again – picking up 6.4 visits per unique since January 2008. Tagged, Flixster and My Yearbook also are doing something right as they have each picked up over 4 visits per unique in that time. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Bebo … who has lost over 2 visits per unique.
Thanks again to the good folks over at Compete.com for all the free data …
Jason Jhonson
