Top 20 Social Networks Ranked
03/17/2007, 1 year 5 months ago
There are a great many social networks in existence today. Too many. It?s an industry inside an industry, and it?s starting to get stretched thin.
By now you?ve probably found your favorite among the choices. If you?re a die-hard music fan, you?ve probably skipped over MySpace for a more specialized circle, one with plenty of audiophiles and talk of underground scenes thriving beneath the radar. Perhaps you?d like to have more sophisticated discourse. There are places to get your intellectual fix, too. So have you ever wished to know where your social network stands among others?
Hitwise, an online establishment who?s purpose is to track trends and chart statistics (a zeitgeist; a potpourri of information), watched the social networking scene over the course of a month (January to February 2007), and has some pretty profound findings.
Number one on the list needs no introduction. MySpace reigns the world, and whether we like it or not, it?s going to remain king of the mountain. It?s hated by many, tolerated by more, and strangely loved by the majority. But did you think that it ever had close to 80% of the market? (80.74% is the precise figure.)
That makes you wonder what paltry amount of the pie the runner up has been able to amass over its equally brief history. Facebook, the digital landscape the ?MySpace exodus? allegedly flocks to in droves was able to claim just 10.32% as of February. And in relation to #2, #3 (Bebo) can vouch for a mere 1.18%.
The rest of the field more or less scrounges for members MySpace and Facebook have been unsuccessful in attracting. Numbers 4 through 10 are: BlackPlanet, Xanga, iMeem, Yahoo! 360, Classmates, Hi5, and Tagged, respectively. They?ve been able to build 0.67-0.88% shares for themselves.
The remaining top twenty social networking sites:
LiveJournal ? 0.49%
GaiaOnline ? 0.48%
Friendster ? 0.34%
Orkut ? 0.26%
Microsoft?s Live Spaces ? 0.18%
HoverSpot ? 0.18%
Buzznet ? 0.18%
Sconex ? 0.14%
MiGente ? 0.11%
MyYearbook ? 0.11%
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Just an interesting thing to note here. Once you start dropping below double-digit numbers — I.E. the “big guys”, it’s pretty meaningless to build top N lists. You’d have to be clairvoyant. When you’re talking 0.x% reach, it’s just to easy to *not know about* somebody. For example, according to Alexa, CherryTap.com has had 2-4x the reach/rank/pageviews of HoverSpot since november. Never heard of ‘em? They want to be the first “online pub and happy hour”. They’re pretty much the archetypal example of “web 2.0 as grand video game” (with apologies to Gaia Online which is actually *intended* as a game, versus having created a de facto ‘game’ essentially by accident). Of course, Alexa disagrees substantially with Hitwise about how the sites near the bottom of the pack rate, with BuzzNet.com vastly outstripping HoverSpot, BlackPlanet and so forth for example.
In other words, when you’re that far down the long tail, the data is all noise and there’s really not much sense in devoting this much attention to rankings. Now, it’s always worth looking around to find up-and-comers or groups with creative and interesting ideas, but ordering them according to perceived success is a bit of a fool’s errand.