MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites are in the news
frequently of late, mostly for things that are bad. Yet with all of the bad
press these sites get, they still have massive user bases and generate huge
amounts of web traffic.
InformationWeek
reports that MySpace gobbled up the majority of traffic in 2007 to
social networking sites with a massive 76.3% of the market according to numbers
from Hitwise. The second place site for overall traffic was Facebook with a
distant 12.57% of the social networking site traffic.
Bebo was third with a scant 1.24% of the traffic, BlackPlanet had 0.87% of
the traffic and the remaining sites out of the 53 leading social networking
sites counted by Hitwise accounted for 8.97% of U.S. social networking visits.
Even though MySpace garners the most visits of any U.S. social networking
site by far, the biggest growth in the social networking space top four comes
from Facebook. Hitwise says that Facebook grew by 51% with a total market share
of 16.03% in December. The biggest gains over all in measured social networking
sites came from little known MyYearbook, the number seven social networking
site online, grew a massive 407% in December to claim 0.73% of the total social
networking traffic.
The two biggest social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook, have both had
significant legal issues recently. MySpace was sued
by the parents of a teen who killed herself after being assaulted by a man
she met on the site. MySpace also recently agreed to third-party monitoring of
its site in a deal with 49 states. Facebook
filed legal action in December against attackers seeking to steal
information on its site users.
