Archive for the ‘Market Share’ Category

Source: Compete Blog

Earlier this week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg made Forbes list of the World’s Richest Men. Facebook certainly had more ups than downs in 2007, but can the site continue its rapid growth into 2008? Where’s MySpace and what else is going in the social web? It appears that the real movers in and shakers in 2008 weren’t moving much in early 2007.

For the big players in the space, February represented a slight decrease in traffic, but the year- over-year growth rates seem to indicate that social networking (as an industry) has yet to peak. The table below shows the top social networks in February 2008, ranked by monthly visits. This ranking factors in both total audience size, and also intensity of use.

• Myspace was down slightly from February 2007 in terms of total US visits. However, the networking giant still holds a commanding traffic lead over all other Social sites.
• Facebook visits fell slightly from January 2008 to February 2008, but over the year the site has grown by over 75%. In terms of US visitors, it is now about one half the size of Myspace, but receives about 1/3rd as many visits.
• Niche markets are still attractive in terms of Social networking: Cafemom (a social network geared towards mothers), Linkedin (a networking site for professionals) and Fubar (“the first online bar”) all grew by 5X or more from February 2007 through February 2008. Fubar, in fact, exploded into the top 20 networks from relative obscurity one year ago.
• Innovative business models also had success in 2007: Communication platform Twitter, and white label social network Ning, both found a dramatically larger audience in the past year.

While fairly flat trend lines in MySpace traffic may provide an indication of the market reaching its peak, the rapid growth of some very new players in the space speaks to the opportunities in social networking that still exist… but only time will tell if Zuckerburg makes Forbe’s list next year.

Facebook, and social networks in particular, are a medium to “Simply be you, online!”. It is essentially different from everything that is on the web because it brings a flow of real people with real identities and real interaction with their friends, families, fans, followers and future contacts.

When the web burst into the scenes with Netscape in 95, there was a famous saying “On the Internet you do not know if you are a dog” because it was new to create web sites for dogs and cats. But on social networks, I don’t think people create pages for their pets, instead they create real pages for themselves and brag about their pets.

We have looked at cumulative stats of market share of various social networks worldwide. So, we all agree it is a global phenomenon. But each of us are on one social network predominantly and are on couple more networks which we think are much smaller.

Valleywag got a world map of social networks in different acountries from Alexa (picture below, credits: valleywag.com)

 Why is this so? I am primarily on facebook, have accounts on Orkut and Myspace with overlapping social graph, but there are some relations which are never going to leave one network to another to be with me because the majority of their real social graphs are on that network.

The reason Facebook is my primary network is because it brings my real social network from real life onto facebook.  

This is a natural reason that will bring the entire world with all its diversity into diverse set of networks and hopefully provide creativity for new technologies to bridge across various networks according to the user’s choice.

Here is an interesting grouping of social networks marketshare per continent worldwide (source:lemonde.fr)

The social media market is hot! The valuation for Facebook is through the roof at $15 billion and due to the magnificent works of upside potential in a soon-to-be public or acquired company (and a mishap by Microsoft?) Facebook has managed to “pull a Google”- stealing top coders and employees from other companies in the Valley, namely Google itself.  But what happened to search? It has been relegated to be the “old web” as GigaOm puts it. Even though search is not as hot as it once was (uh, 6 months ago?), it continues to command an impressive market share and continuing to grow much more than any other internet service and at the cusp of search we find Google.  As you can in the graph, Google’s search market share is over 75% and growing.  To enter this market as a service provider you need to be specialized.  A company/consultant should have a deep knowledge of search (1st and 2nd tier engines), statistics, analytics, market segmentation and a strong knowledge of people’s behaviors online. You need to draw conclusions from the general to the specific and build business cases with supporting data behind it. It seems to be a field in which only “pure” search marketing companies or agencies are engaging. In other words you need to be a searchhead.  

Avinash is a great example. His blog aims to demystify analytics - a good read even though he continues to ask if he continues to ask whether real time data is really necessary.  On the other hand we have the folks that are engaging in what has come to be known as new media. The Socialists. Podcasting, community marketing, viral marketing, twitter, facebook, myspace, utterz, seesmic, tubemogul, etc .

The socialists seem to have lower barriers to entry since it is quite unchartered territory (compared to search) and the market is growing rapidly and absorbing talent quickly. An environment where social chops and the courage to get in front of a camera or a microphone with content of some value seems to be more coveted than an analytical “search” mind. It is more about building an ongoing conversation in the community in an attempt to garnish micro-influence across niche markets and to push messages important to us and the community.  

Chris explains how to help someone understand social media in one of his posts - an interesting read nonetheless.  Search is here to stay as long as Google continues to deliver accurate and reliable results in a fraction of a second to the world’s search queries.  In an ever-changing internet environment  where businesses evolve and transform at ease, the top of the cusp is always up for grabs and facebook is proving to be a colosal competitor to Google forcing the giant to review their strategy by speeding up OpenSocial.  The line between socialists and searchhead is blurring quickly which might give way to a new breed of internet marketeer who is comfortable in the multifaceted conversation and web-analytics savvy. 

• The market share of visits to the custom category of the top 20 social networking sites increased by 11.5% from January 2007 to February 2007. Year-over-year (February 2006 - February 2007) category traffic was up 87%.
• Traffic to MySpace was up 10.2% from January to February 2007 and 107.3% year over year.
• Buzznet and IMEEM showed the fastest growth within the category, with visits increasing 148.4% and 145.7% respectively from January to February 2007.
• Other fast growing sites included Hoverspot (up 19.6%) and Bebo (up 17.8%).

Source: Hitwise