I watched a very interesting webinar this morning focused on Social Networking put on by Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescot. Her presentation was geared towards the topics of Social Networking, Photo Hosting and Video. Here are some of the key takeaways (all information is based on US Traffic):

Social Networking

• The Top 20 Social networking sites account for 1 of every 20 Internet visits
• MySpace has an 82% Share of these Top 20 Social Network Sites
• MySpace is the leader in Social Networking and has had a growth of rate of 50% from Mar-Sept 2006

Here are the top five social networking sites, with their percentage of share and average visit duration:

Top 5 Social Networking Sites

1. MySpace - 82% - 30:22
2. FaceBook - 7.24% - 8:17
3. Xanga - 1.86% - 12:00
4. Yahoo 360 - 1.21% - 11:42
5. Black Planet - 1.12% - 20:19

Here’s a few mor stats on social networking sites:

• The Average Social Networking user belongs to at least 3 networking sites
• Upcoming Social Networking sites include: iMeem, FaceBox, 43 Things, Multiply and Vox
• Categorical sites such as Music, Ticketing, Apparel, Video Games and Auctions are receiving the most benefit from MySpace in terms of upstream traffic.

Photo Hosting

• PhotoBucket is the top photo hosting site and has an 8X greater share than 2nd place ImageShack
• The average user session is > 10 min
• Photo sites received 30% of their upstream traffic from MySpace
• Flickr’s visits are up 49% from Mar-Sept 2006
• 35% of traffic is from Search (majority of it is non branded traffic)
• Flickr actually has a much older demographic than PhotoBucket

Video

• YouTube has grown 500% this year
• According to HitWise, YouTube is the 17th most popular site last week
• YouTube has a greater share in online video than MySpace’s Video, Google Video, Yahoo Video and MetaCafe
• MetaCafe has grown 133% in the last year
• 3.6% of YouTube’s downstream traffic goes to television sites such as Cartoons, News, Sports and Music

Also, be sure to check out the Hitwise blog.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 01, 2006, at 4:20 am, and is filed under Social Networking, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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