Jon Holato

According to HitWise figures, internet traffic for the top 20 social networking sites increased by 11.5% from January to February of this year. This boost in activity means that the these sites now account for 6.5% of all internet traffic, and this figure is increasing.

Here are the top 20 social networking sites in order of market share:

1. MySpace - 80.74%
2. Facebook - 10.32%
3. Bebo - 1.18%
4. BlackPlanet - 0.88%
5. Xanga - 0.87%
6. iMeem - 0.73%
7. Yahoo! 360 - 0.72%
8. Classmates - 0.72%
9. hi5 - 0.69%
10. Tagged - 0.67%
11. LiveJournal - 0.49%
12. Gaiaonline - 0.48%
13. Friendster - 0.34%
14. Orkut - 0.26%
15. Live Spaces - 0.18%
16. HoverSpot - 0.18%
17. Buzznet - 0.18%
18. Sconex - 0.14%
19. Migente - 0.11%
20. myYearbook - 0.11%

Clearly MySpace is the most popular social networking site on the internet, and Facebook is pretty well positioned at #2. It’s just a shame that MySpace has become so overrun with spam, otherwise it could actually be a pretty cool and useful site. What surprises me is how little market share Xanga and LiveJournal have, I had always thought of these sites as large traffic drivers. It would be interesting to see them compared against Blogger to see how the blogging market share stacked up.

At any rate, what we can take from this as sort of a high-level overview is that social networking is clearly on the rise, and that it cannot be ignored. Web marketers need pay attention to this popular vertical, as some estimates predict that ad spending on such sites will top $2 billion by 2010.