Everybody was buzzing last month about Bebo, the social network that experienced unprecedented growth in March, achieving a monumental 49% increase in unique traffic to their website.

Although networks like Facebook grew more into terms of total users over the same period, Bebo took the prize for the fastest rate of growth; at 49% growth month to month, Bebo was far ahead of the pack.
Since AOL’s acquisition earlier this year of the Bebo network, traffic to the UK-based social network had increased dramatically, due in part to AOL’s decision to begin porting their profiles over to Bebo in March and integrating their online and IM clients with the social network. While the move to acquire a pre-existing social network isn’t unique among the old portal giants (Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us and MyBlogLog), the immediate explosion in the growth of monthly unique visitors to Bebo’s network was.

When the April numbers came in, however, it became apparent that the massive spike was in growth rate was, largely, a one-time thing. However, the modest drop in the growth rate (-5%) indicates that Bebo is doing a good job of keeping traffic at their current levels – which is still significantly higher than it was before. Although the rate of growth may have slowed, the amount of traffic seems to be remaining steady – meaning that opportunities on the Bebo network are significantly better for both advertisers and publishers than they were before the March spike.
The integration of Bebo and AOL began in March, as did the bump in traffic. As more and more AOL users begin to populate their Bebo profiles and network with the pre-existing body of Bebo users, this bump in traffic can be expected to sustain for some time.

We have recently localized the Ad Chap user interface in French language.  Now French advertisers and publishers can have the convenience of Ad Chap social advertising in their native language.

If your main browser language is French you should get the user interface in French automatically.   If not, you can change the language manually at the bottom of the screen.

For French publishers, of course we also have French language advertisers for delivery to your social applications and your users in France.

We have more localizations planned for 2009 and will announce them here as they are rolled out.

If you don’t already have an account, you can sign up for free in just a few minutes at http://stats.adchap.com

When it comes to relationship status, not all countries are created equal, at least not in the world of online social networking.

According to statistics obtained from Facebook’s analytics system, there is a disproportionately large percentage of users reporting their relationship status as “single” in Middle-Eastern and South Asian countries; meanwhile, there is an equally heavy percentage of users reporting their relationship status as either “In a relationship,” “Engaged,” or “Married” in European countries.

The top ten “most single” countries (as measured by the percentage of Facebook users reporting “single” status in terms of users reporting any relationship status) are Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia and Ghana.

In contrast, the top ten “least single” countries (as measured by the percentage of Facebook users reporting “in a relationship,” “engaged,” or “married” in terms of users reporting any relationship status) are Finland, New Zealand, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Luxembourg, Australia, Ireland, Switzerland.

Glancing at the gender balance of Facebook users in the top 10 most- and least-single countries, we can see some stark and statistically significant findings. Countries with the highest percentage of single Facebook users also have a disproportionately high amount of male Facebook users numbering among those singles.  Countries with a closer balance of single / non-single Facebook users also have a closer gender balance among those singles.

Overall the average percentage of single Facebook users is approximately 39%. The United States, comprising the largest percentage of Facebook users, shows 35% of users reporting “single” relationship status, making the typical American Facebook user slightly less single than average.

It’s important to note that these figures are in proportion to the number of users reporting any relationship status at all. Many Facebook users do not report any relationship status at all, and this demographic information shows equally intriguing results.

On average, 40% of Facebook users do not report any relationship status at all; this could be due to any number of reasons, but likely largely stems from privacy concerns. The five countries with highest percentage of users reporting a relationship status are: the United States, South Africa, Iceland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Australia, Denmark, Honduras and Puerto Rico. Of those ten, five are native English-speaking countries, and the remaining countries have either compulsory ESL (English as a Second Language) programs or high percentages of non-compulsory ESL learners. We can conclude, therefore, that statistically speaking, Facebook users from English-speaking countries tend to report their relationship status more often than Facebook users from non-English-speaking countries.

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.

Although we hear often about the prevalence of social networking among teens, Facebook usage and age demographic data suggest that the vast majority of Facebook users are adults.

The following graph shows a country-by-country breakdown of the percentage of Facebook users below the age of 18, and dispels the myth that most Facebook users are teens.

According to data obtained from Facebook’s demographic reporting program, the mean percentage of Facebook users below the age of eighteen is 12.6%. The United States, currently the largest segment of Facebook’s nearly 175 million users, shows very similar usage, with 12.3% of Facebook users in the United States under the age of 18. The United Kingdom, the 2nd most popular country for Facebook, shows approximately 10.8% of users below 18. Among Canadian Facebook users, 14% are below 18.

Indeed, unlike gender or penetration statistics, when it comes to age, there appears to be little connection between the percentage of under-18 Facebook users and their countries, languages or regions. Countries with the largest number of Facebook users tend to have the largest numbers of teens, but in terms of percentages, there are no clear trends to be found from a first-glance at the data.

All of this seems to jibe with prevailing market research which suggests that Facebook’s fastest growing demographic is, in fact, adults. The Pew Internet and American Life Project has shown that during Q4 of 2008, one of Facebook’s fastest growing demographics was females aged 55 and over. They also show research from December, 2008 that shows that social networking use has quadrupled in the last three years among adults, and that roughly 35% of adults now have profiles on social networks.

What does this all mean in terms of social network advertising? In a nutshell, it means that different age groups may have very different browsing habits, which can have a big impact on how they use social networks – which, of course, can have a big impact on how you advertise to them through those social networks.