Category: Statistics

20 social networking sites make up 4.9% of all online visits

Hitwise has published a very interesting report about CGM – Consumer Generated Media. The report provides a detailed picture of social networking and video sharing websites.

Some of the findings include:

– In September 2006, the market share of visits to the top 20 social networking websites accounted for 4.9% of all Internet visits. This was an increase of 94% compared to September 2005.
– Photobucket is the leading image hosting website, and its market share of visits has grown by 43% from March 2006 to September 2006.
– The market share of visits to YouTube increased by 249% in the six months from March to September 2006, and in September was the 26th most visited website by US Internet users.
– MySpace remains the king of social networking sites with 81.92% market share.

We also see that these sites are driving traffic into commercial websites:
– The share of upstream traffic from MySpace for the Telecommunications category was 89% greater in September 2006 than it was in March 2006.
– An apparel and accessories websites like Hot Topic received 17.4% of upstream visits from MySpace, which was its leading source of traffic.

Quite impressive numbers and a clear sign of the impact social networking sites have on consumers and businesses.

Did Lunarstorm miss the boat?
With these impressive figures at hand, you’ve got to wonder how the Swedish success community site Lunarstorm has been able to miss the social networking boom, or maybe they just peaked early. I did a comparison with Friendster which shows a depressing decline in usage of Lunarstorm. Now, I don’t know if Alexa’s numbers are anywhere near correct, but if they are, Lunarstorm is losing the battle. Statistics from KIA Index at least support the theory that Lunarstorm had more visitors in early 2006 than they do now. Does anyone know what the long term trend looks like?

lunar

 

The press release 100 years old

Via the India PR Blog I notice that the press release supposedly turned 100-years-old on October 28.

“On October 28, 1906, at least 50 people lost their lives when a three-car train of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s newly equipped electric service jumped a trestle at Atlantic City, NJ, and plunged into the Thoroughfare creek. 

That afternoon, Ivy Lee, who some consider to be the father of modern PR, created the first press release. The Pennsylvania Railroad was one of his clients. Following the accident, Lee not only convinced the railroad to distribute a public statement, he also convinced them to provide a special train to get reporters to the scene of the accident.”

About time then that this communications channel evolved a bit. The PR agency SHIFT Communications initiated a discussion around the development of a “social media press release” this summer. The thought was that the press release should be re-designed to fit the new social media/web 2.0 environment. I am sure we will continue to see interesting developments regarding press releases and other PR tactics. For PR practitioners, these are exiting times.

MySpace reached 100 million users

The social networking site MySpace today reached one hundred million registered users. The milestone was reached today at 2.41 PM CET and the last few hours the site got about 70-80 new members per minute, according to my own observations.

I watched the site to see when the magic number would be reached, unfortunately the page of member #100,000,000 seems to be invalid:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid;=100000000

In April this year, Aber Whitcomb, chief technology officer of MySpace, predicted that the site would serve 100 million members in January 2007, a goal the site now reached 5 months earlier. According to Wikipedia, MySpace is the most popular website in the United States and is currently growing with 500,000 new users each week.

(I registered a page too, but only managed to come as near as 100 million as number 99999927)

Tags: , , , . Ping.

Corporate blogs to double in 2006

JupiterResearch say that “deployment of corporate blogs will double in 2006”. According to their research 35 percent of large companies plan to launch corporate blogs this year. In addition to the existing 34 percent, “nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006”. I find that a little hard to believe, but I haven’t seen the research behind the numbers.

The report also says that “currently 64 percent of executives spend less than $500,000 to deploy and manage corporate Weblogs”. I’m not sure how to interpret those numbers but you must admit that you get a little curious about how 36 percent manage to spend above $500,000 when these babies are practically a no-cost communications channel.

Tags: , .

BloggSverige 2 – dags för en ny bloggenkät

För ett år sedan genomförde jag den första stora svenska undersökningen av bloggare och bloggläsare, BloggSverige 1.0. Sedan dess har bloggvärlden utvecklats enormt och därför är det dags för en uppföljning. För att kunna överträffa förra årets 600 enkätsvar, behöver jag andra bloggares hjälp med att sprida information om enkäten.

Därför skulle jag vilja be så många som möjligt att:

1) fylla i enkäten genom att klicka på följande länk:
Klicka här för att fylla i enkäten.

2) om du har en egen blogg, lägga upp en text på din blogg i stil med följande:
Bloggen Media Culpa genomför sin andra undersökning av svenska bloggare och bloggläsare och behöver deltagare till sin enkät. Svara på enkäten genom att klicka på länken och uppmana gärna fler att delta: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=956142272223

Enkäten tar bara ett par minuter och är helt anonym. Resultaten presenteras här inom kort. Tack på förhand.

Uppdatering 30 juni kl 23:40. På drygt två dagar har vi fått in över 500 svar vilket är en fantastisk respons. Förhoppningsvis kan vi få in ett par hundra svar till över helgen så att vi får ett bra underlag att jobba med.