Penguin Perspective - Newsletter April 2008

Penguin Perspective - Newsletter April 2008

April 7th 2008

Social networking, the buzz is over yes/no? With Facebook having suffered two consecutive drops in users over January and February does this mean that users are tiring of social networking, will marketeers still be getting a decent ROI for their widgets, games and adverts? We think so and this is why...

Yes Facebook's UK unique user numbers have dropped for a second month in a row from 8.9 million in December 2007 to 8.3 million in February 08.

Yes MySpace in the UK has lost 14% of its users in the past 3 months and Bebo has seen an 8% drop since October.

The media is full of articles on the failure of social networking because of these drops in usage but most of it focuses on the impact for those networking sites themselves and how they will generate enough cash to survive their virtual worth's of billions of dollars.

The fact remains that these sites still have millions of users and for the average marketer with limited budgets having access to these networks users is still very attractive.

These drops could also be seasonal downturns and let's not forget that as social networks expand their users, the average session time will also increase as the users have more friends to interact with.

Instead of focusing on the drop in growth of users, which had to happen at some time after the initial phenomenal growth, let's look at current figures.

Facebook has worldwide more than 67 million active users (8m in the UK)

Facebook is the 5th most-trafficked website in the world (comScore)

More than 65 billion page views per month

MySpace has over 80 million profiles (2.3m in the UK)

Bebo has 36 million users worldwide (9m in the UK)

 

From Hitwise

Market Share of U.S. Internet Visits to Top 10 Social Networking Websites

Rank

Name

Domain

Dec-07

Dec-06

YoY % Change

1

MySpace

www.myspace.com

72.32%

78.89%

-8%

2

Facebook

www.facebook.com

16.03%

10.59%

51%

3

Bebo

www.bebo.com

1.09%

0.99%

10%

4

BlackPlanet.com

www.blackplanet.com

1.04%

0.96%

8%

5

Club Penguin

www.clubpenguin.com

0.80%

0.54%

48%

6

Gaiaonline.com

www.gaiaonline.com

0.76%

0.58%

31%

7

myYearbook

www.myyearbook.com

0.73%

0.14%

407%

8

hi5

www.hi5.com

0.63%

0.64%

-1%

9

Classmates

www.classmates.com

0.55%

0.58%

-7%

10

Yahoo! 360

360.yahoo.com

0.54%

0.91%

-40%

 

So don't dismiss social networking because of media hype, it will settle down eventually but there will still be millions of potential customers worth targeting on these networks and the niche players are worth thinking about too.

(With thanks to Hitwise for the figures)