Social Networks Still Growing Strong

Stats to be released tomorrow by comScore show that traffic to most of the top social networking sites is continuing to increase in the US, although the amount of time users spend on such sites is leveling off. For example, while MySpace is showing 11.6% year-to-year growth in unique visitors and Facebook is up 78.6%, the amount of time the average user spends on each site is down 10.4% and up just 1.1%, respectively. Further, the average time spent on Bebo is off 63.6%, though the US is only a small part of that social network’s user base.

Looking closer at the engagement metrics, it’s notable that MySpace users still spend the most time on the site versus users of other social networks. In January, the average visitor spent 203.9 minutes on the site (a 13.7% month-to-month increase), while the average Facebook visitor was logged on for 172.1 minutes (a 1.6% month-to-month increase, but notably down from a high of 199.9 minutes per visitor in February ’07).

The decline in minutes per user on Facebook certainly adds more credence to the theory that interest in applications is starting to fall off. Meanwhile, a few Facebook-like additions such as a friend news feed and improved photo galleries seem to be keeping users on MySpace as the top social network prepares to launch its own developer platform to users next month.

A few other notable numbers from the report:

* YouTube unique visitors more than doubled in the past year, to 61.3 million visitors in January. Page views were up 277%.
* Flickr unique visitors were up 88.5% to nearly 14 million. Page views were up 266% year-over-year to 340 million in January.
* Yahoo 360 unique visitors plunged 53.4% to 2.2 million. Page views were down 54.6% to 52 million.
* Unique visitors to Facebook fell 2.3% from December. They are essentially flat since August (33.7 million, versus 33.8 million for January).

Clearly, YouTube is benefiting from being acquired by Google and integrated into search results, while Flickr is continuing to grow under the Yahoo umbrella. As for Yahoo 360, its demise probably doesn’t come as a huge surprise given Yahoo’s ever-shifting social networking strategy.

mashable.com