TechCrunch reports on the Top Social Media Sites of 2008 from a report by ComScore. Excerpt:
What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with
its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger … still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook … is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. WordPress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.
Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list. It is really more of a social media site list, which is what I’m renaming it for this post. It is not definitive, but it gives a good lay of the land. (Here is a similar ranking from 2007). …
Top Social Media Sites
- Blogger (222 million)
- Facebook (200 million)
- MySpace (126 million)
- WordPress (114 million)
- Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
- Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
- Flickr (64 million)
- hi5 (58 million)
- Orkut (46 million)
- Six Apart (46 million)
- Baidu Space (40 million)
- Friendster (31 million)
- 56.com (29 million)
- Webs.com (24 million)
- Bebo (24 million)
- Scribd (23 million)
- Lycos Tripod (23 million)
- Tagged (22 million)
- imeem (22 million)
- Netlog (21 million)
(ranked by unique worldwide visitors November 2008; comScore)
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
As part of a social media/social network project I was working on I put together a Guide. I called it the Community Banker’s Guide to Social Network Marketing and made it freely available at http://www.docstoc.com/docs/2873849/The-Community-Bankers-Guide-to-Social-Network-Marketing.
The Guide, while targeting bankers (what I am), applies to all industries. The first couple chapters speak to what is discussed in this post and Facebook’s movement from second to MySpace to the 800 pound gorilla. The Guide describes the place that Facebook, MySpace and the other networks play relative to the social media spectrum. It’s a pretty good piece and has received great feedback.
I think it describes much of what is discussed in this post but in a bit more detail..