Wed

Apr 9
2008

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

Worldwide Social Network Market Share

Via Azeem Azaar's twitter feed, a great visualization of worldwide social network market share, from Le Monde:

map of worldwide social network market share

 
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Comments: 28

  Tony Stubblebine [04.09.08 10:51 AM]

I wonder if this is purely the result of viral adoption or users experience some benefit to having a critical mass of members from the same culture even if they aren't directly linked to those members.

We (CrowdVine) build social networks for conferences and get asked all the time why the conference couldn't just build a group in Facebook. Primarily the answer is empirical, the conference gets a lot more activity and the attendees make a lot more new connections if the network is independent. I suspect the underlying reason is that members who are too far outside your community are distracting, like joining a programming mailing list where half the posts were about quilting and in Russian.

  davidm [04.09.08 11:52 AM]

Where's China? I know they use IM client called QQ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QQ). "It is estimated that there are over 160 million QQ users in China." Where are they hanging out?

  Michael R. Bernstein [04.09.08 12:27 PM]

Hmm. I'd like to see this overlayed on a cartogram of the online population (ie. countries resized proportionally to the total number of people online).

  sikantis [04.09.08 08:28 PM]

I like to see how small the world really is. And yes, I'd like to see more details.

  Perry [04.10.08 09:35 AM]

Huh, I wonder why ncludr.com didn't make the list? It's by far the largest social network, with billions of international users.

  Horst [04.11.08 01:06 PM]

I am wondering that in europa are so less facebook users.

  spu [04.14.08 12:02 AM]

Maybe it is a bit of the old French-German-rivalry -- in Europe the Xing network is nonexistent on this map, though I suppose it might make number one in Germany, possibly Austria and since they bought a Spanish competitor also in Spain. All white spots on the (French) map.

  Paul [04.14.08 01:11 AM]

Ah nice, ähm is this picer very old?? i think it is from ne last month.

  Tobias Jost [04.21.08 05:29 AM]

Interesting... I'm from Germany and haven't even heard of "Bebo"...

In Germany, I feel StudiVZ/SchülerVZ/MeinVZ is the main Social Network for young people, expanding from being a Facebook clone only for students at first to 3 networks, one for students, one for pupils, one for the other folks. Student and general networks are connected to each other, the pupils network stays seperate.

There is also a more business oriented network called xing, which seems to be very frequented.

MySpace is also quite big here, especially for Bands.

Facebook Germany is new here... I think they are entering the market too late.

There are a couple more networks like lokalisten.de which are heavily promoted but lack market share.

In General, the boom of social networks is fading, there's a lot of criticism going on ranging from security issues over unpleasant design (I'm talking about you myspace!) to the meaning of adding someone to the list of your 100s of friend you haven't even talked to.

  Adam Stanhope [05.18.08 12:52 PM]

I can verify the prevalence of "Hi5.com" in Thailand. My wife's family is all in Thailand and Hi5.com is absolutely the focus of all of their social interaction online.

Any groovy "farangs" want to meet my sweet and lovely sister-in-law? She's on Hi5 at:

http://hi5.com/friend/profile/displayProfile.do?userid=178055106

Definitely drop me a note:

http://LungDam.hi5.com

  Jonathan [05.18.08 02:50 PM]

They've left out Japan, where Mixi is a the dominant social network. It's currently #62 in Alexa's global traffic rankings.

  Dylan [05.18.08 08:21 PM]

As Jonathan said above, in Japan Mixi is by far the dominant network. Purely from personal observation, the order would be something like:

1) Mixi
2) MySpace
3) Facebook (distant 3rd)

  ryan [05.19.08 12:03 AM]

imeem.com is the third largest social network in the US according to compete. Pushing more music streams a month than yahoo or myspace.

hi5 is very solid in Mexico, Portugal and Romania.

Friendster dominates in south eastern asia.

Piczo is growing in Germany.

Nexopia is huge in western Canada.

Miro-niches are where it's at right now as far as explosive growth. There is no longer room for anyone new to become a portal. Existing owners of vast social graphs are locking down what they have now. Friend Connect debacle is an example of this.

  Merrill [05.19.08 12:44 AM]

The data is old : Août 2007 = August 2007 !

  Brian King [05.19.08 06:13 AM]

It seems the numbers are off as well. Current numbers from Facebook peg it at 26 million in the US right now, and 70 million worldwide. MySpace now is at about 289 million worldwide.

  Eric Grant [05.19.08 01:46 PM]

Things look right for Canada being dominated by Facebook. I'd say close to 50% of the people I know in real life, of any age, use Facebook (I live in Toronto), and no one uses anything else, unless they're musicians and have a Myspace page in addition to Facebook, or they have an old-school livejournal, which is regarded much more as a blogging tool these days than a networking tool.

  treacle [05.20.08 12:59 PM]

Would have been so great if you'd have linked to the actual Le Monde article, and not just their homepage. Grr.

  treacle [05.20.08 01:06 PM]

And Twitter-Azeem's "updates are protected". Why not link to the actual source article? And that graphic renders poorly, where is the original? Gah!

  Roland Judas [06.30.08 02:13 AM]

I live in Germany, where Social Networking is taking off at the moment throughout all age groups. For Business user the XING network, which is comparable to LinkIn with 5,7m users. Students and scholar are meeting in StudiVZ and SchuelerVZ which have together 11m users in that group, which is quite impressive. For adults beside myspace and facebook, there are a number of local networks starting up, like lokalisten.de and wer-kennt-wen.de which have together round about 5m users. At all networks the figures are going up rapidly.

Roland

  rajesh [10.12.08 02:05 AM]

linkedin.com and livebiznet.com are very popular in india networking community

  humedia [10.26.08 11:39 PM]

In Order to get an overview I defenitively would recommend to mention data sources, we are monitoring social networks for some years now, and I never saw a map that incomplete and useless.

  Berkan [10.27.08 08:32 AM]

Hi there, I think the data is not complated yet cause there is a new generation soccial networking site eupee.com is not available in the site it is popular in USA, UK, Poland and Russia, Now it is prepearing to enter South America... I believe new trend will be eupee.com

  web tasarım [12.05.08 12:22 AM]

very interesting dispersion pattern.

  web tasarim [01.15.09 02:14 PM]

There is also a more business oriented network called xing, which seems to be very frequented.

  halı yıkama [04.04.09 09:53 AM]

This is interesting dispersion pattern.

  4images [05.20.09 06:43 PM]

Perfect theme! (:

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