The Ten Most Visited Social Networking Websites in the United States – March, 2009

2008 was an amazing year for social networking; overall, the number of unique visitors to social networks grew by hundreds of millions, bringing with them unique, fresh opportunities (and challenges) for advertisers and application developers.

(Note: All statistics shown cover the United States only.)

From a first glance at the graph, a few things become quickly obvious:

Facebook is on the way up in a big way. Skyrocketing from around 41 million unique visitors in September 2009 to almost 74 million in February of 2009, Facebook has definitely pulled out to the head of the pack. During that five month period the social network’s averge monthly growth during was around 6.5 million unique visitors, or somewhere around 215,000 unique visitors a day.

Myspace, on the other hand, seems to be currently experiencing a decline in monthly unique visits. This may be due to Myspace’s dramatic concentration of younger users aging and the network’s failure to attract new youngsters at the rate that old ones are going inactive (the topic of a forthcoming AdChap blog post). In roughly December, 2008, Myspace was outmatched by Facebook, and the spunky social network seems to have started a slow downward turn since then, despite its syndication of popular television shows like Prison Break and 24.

Ad Chap services for advertisers and publishers is available on both Myspace and Facebook. In February, 2009, those two networks together experienced over 125 million monthly unique visitors in the USA.

Smaller social networks are having mixed results. On the one hand, in little over a year, Twitter has grown from less than a million to around seven million unique visitors per month, and that’s only recording traffic to the Twitter.com website; users connecting through the API constitute the majority of the micro-blogging platform’s daily user base.

Reunion.com started catching up to rival Classmates.com, the latter of which experienced little overall growth in 2008 (16%). Upstart Flixster, whose Facebook application has consistently ranked among the top ten Facebook applications, experienced a peak in traffic around July of 2008 and has maintained more or less steady traffic since then, despite allegations by some users of “spammy” invitation features.

LinkedIn, perhaps the most refined and professional of social networks, has also enjoyed upward slopes in its unique visitors throughout 2008 and sits solidly at #5.

On the lower end of the spectrum, Club Penguin’s niche audience warbled slightly but remained roughly steady throughout the year.

AOL, like longtime Fantastic Four villain Dr. Doom and ailing Cuban ex-dictator Fidel Castro, stubbornly refuses to die; monthly unique visitors to its AOL Community site declined to just 483,000 in February 2009, a 25% decrease from a year before. That’s in stark contrast to Microsoft’s Windows Live Home network, which enjoyed a 25% increase in traffic to its social networking site from the same time last year.

Looking into the future, it is safe to assume that Facebook’s momentum will continue to carry them upward throughout 2009, although we can’t assume that they will continue to experience such rapid growth as particular demographics begin to become “saturated” with users. On the other hand, the social networking behemoth is constantly seeking new demographics to tap into.
The same can be said for Myspace’s apparent decline; the social network will almost certainly take proactive steps to bring back inactive users in 2009; the effectiveness of their music, tv and other attempts remains to be seen.

One thing we can safely say, though, is that in spite of the rise and fall of specific social networks, the overall trend is dramatically upward-reaching. Barring a global apocalypse, social networking is going to continue to grow well into the next decade, as will monetization opportunities for developers and continued reach to drive sales for advertisers.

Interested in tapping into the wellspring of social networking traffic? Or are you a social networking application developer? Ad Chap has a solution for you.  We are currently available on Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster.

This entry was posted on March 11th, 2009 and is filed under Online Advertising, Social Networking. 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.