The Hyves social network, one of the most popular websites and social networks in the Netherlands, is the most recent addition to the Ad Chap advertising network. With one of the highest penetration rates in the industry, Hyves represents a huge opportunity to application developers and advertisers alike; it’s estimated that over 1/3 of the entire population of the Netherlands is using Hyves, leading many high-profile Dutch celebrities to join the service (perhaps most notably Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende).

Currently Hyves boasts over nine million users, up two million users from July, 2008. Currently 95% of the traffic to the Hyves.nl domain comes from within the Netherlands. Hyves’ demographics are somewhat different than those of some other social networks, largely because of the predominantly Dutch population of the social network.

Hyves users fall predominantly within the 15 – 25 age bracket, with over 28% of their user base counted in this age bracket. Additionally, a significant 12% of Hyves user base is under the age of 15, a significant figure when compared to other social networks, particularly Twitter, which is notoriously devoid of the teenage demographic. Hyves’ youthful population is particularly attractive to celebrities, political figures and others interested in connecting with the youth of the Netherlands; younger generations can be difficult to connect with, and Hyves is one of the ways that important people in the Netherlands are bridging that age gap.

A significant 20% of Hyves users do not report their age; it’s probably safe to assume that these users are fairly evenly spread across the bell-curve distribution of age groups. Hyves shows strong popularity among users aged 25 – 45, and as those age groups (and the Hyves social network) age, the 45+ age demographic can be expected to fill out somewhat.

When it comes to gender distribution, Hyves is a very balanced social network; there is a slightly larger proportion of women to men on the social network, which mirrors the trend in social networking in general. Almost 10% of Hyves users don’t report their gender, so the true ratio of women to men on Hyves may be slightly more skewed than it appears. In terms of targeting, though, it’s safe to assume a nearly 50/50 balance of males to females on the Hyves network.

Looking at Hyves relationship demographics reveals some interesting trends, possibly related to cultural differences in the Netherlands; although only 20% of Hyves users don’t report age, and 9% don’t report gender, a massive 69% of Hyves users don’t report their relationship status. That’s significantly larger than on other social networks like Facebook or Myspace, where a lesser proportion of users hide their relationship status.

Of the Hyves users that do report their relationship status, there is a fairly balanced ratio of singles, people in relationships, and married users.

In terms of usage, Hyves’ analytics and statistics show a robust platform with a highly engaged base of users. The Hyves.nl domain receives over 70,000 unique visitors per day, and boasts approximately 380,000 daily visits. Hyves users spend a decent amount of time each day on the Hyves.nl domain; the average visit to Hyves.nl lasts about 22 minutes. The average user views 22 pages per day on Hyves; put together, these statistics show that the average time spent per page on Hyves is approximately one minute, meaning that advertisements have a chance to “sink in” and get a good amount of eyeballs.

Put together, the data indicates that Hyves is a powerful, fast-growing social network with a very specific, highly engaged audience that comes back to the website several times throughout the day and spends a significant amount of time there. As the Hyves social network continues to grow, it’s a good bet that the older age brackets will fill out, as parents, professionals, and other older users find more and more reasons to join the social network. What’s more, the incredible penetration rate among users from the Netherlands can be expected to cause a positive feedback loop, with more and more Dutch users joining the site because so many peers are already using it.

Since many residents of the Netherlands speak both English and Dutch as native languages, they represent a big opportunity for advertisers in both languages. In short, Hyves is a great place for advertisers and developers alike to reach out to the youth of the Netherlands, and, possibly, the rest of the world, as Hyves’ non-Dutch user base is also expected to grow rapidly in the coming years.

Netlog, the Belgian social networking website that’s up-and-coming fast in the world of social networking is the latest offering on the Ad Chap network. Netlog has caught a lot of critical acclaim for using advanced localization technologies to target their varied userbase; although Netlog was originally created to target the European youth demographic, the site has since taken off internationally and sees wide usage across several demographics throughout the world.

In terms of usage patterns, Netlog has fairly good retention for a fast-growing social network; users spend, on average, almost 17 minutes / day on the netlog.com domain and localized subdomains. In terms of pageviews, over the last year Netlog has seen some ups and downs; in January, 2009, unique visitors and visits peaked, followed by a small slope off in February, which then leveled off and has remained roughly steady over the past six months.

In terms of national demographics, Netlog is a very varied social network for its size. Created for the European community, Netlog has since become quite popular across the continent.   As social networking gains in popularity in those areas, we can assume that a disproportionately large portion of Netlog’s userbase will hail from these countries.

Language                 Members
Español                    8 897 205
English                     7 528 534
Français                   6 470 199
Türkçe                      6 333 215
Português                3 726 983
Italiano                    3 616 781
Deutsch                   3 390 745
Nederlands             2 791 155
Română                   1 364 690
Other languages     5 122 613
Total                         49 242 120
In particular the Spanish demographic can be expected to grow significantly as internet access and awareness of social networking continue to skyrocket in these areas.

In general, Netlog presents a good opportunity for advertisers interested in reaching particular geographic demographics, since Netlog itself is such a varied platform in terms of language and content, and since Netlog’s content distribution system already ensures that users are seeing the best content for their area, in the language they expect to see it in. Growth can be expected to continue as the social network moves forward with new features and enhancements to its popular “tribes” social group system. With users adding friends as quickly as they can, eyeballs on Netlog applications are expected to shoot up quickly, and their application platform makes it that much more attractive to develop and monetize applications for the Netlog social network.

Last week we have added the ability for application developers on the netlog social network to deliver ads with Ad Chap to monetize their applications.

Ad Chap is now available on the following social networks:

facebook
bebo
friendster
hi5
myspace
netlog

For those of you that are not familiar with netlog, we will be posting an overview of of this popular European social network in the coming week.

Believe it or not, Facebook hasn’t taken over the entire world – yet.
Thanks to Vincenzo Cosenza, an Italian social network specialist, and IBM’s “Many Eyes” project, you can check out which social networks are dominating in which countries. Note that this information is not 100% up to date, but does an excellent job of showing which social networks are the most popular in each country.

The map confirms what we already know – that Facebook is dominating in Western countries like the United States, that developing countries like India, Brazil and China tend to have radically different preferences in social networking, and that networks like LinkedIn, while popular, do not dominate any particular country.
Users with Java installed can check out an interactive version of the map below:

As Facebook’s global reach continues to spread, we expect to see this map change.
Reminder: Adchap is available on Facebook, as well as the Myspace, Friendster, Bebo, and Hi5 social networks. Check back to our AdChap Blog often for more social networking, social networking demographics and social news and information.

Social networking isn’t just for the youthful anymore, it would seem.

Over the last year there’s been a huge upswing of Facebook users aged 40+, and that shift in demographic is definitely going to start changing the face of the world’s largest social network.

Our statistics show that there are currently roughly 50 million Facebook users under the age of 40 living in the United States. In contrast, there are almost 20 million Facebook users over the age of 40. Statistics for other countries are showing similar patterns.

What does this mean for people advertising in social media? Among other things, it means that the target audience is changing, and that there are more opportunities for advertisers who aren’t pushing “youth” products and services.

Among the baby boomer Facebook crowd, the gender balance is dramatically skewed toward female, with +40 females outnumbering +40 males almost 2/1. This jibes with recent studies showing that older women are better at adopting new technologies than older men.