The Social

Facebook has become the top social network in a majority of European countries for the first time, according to analytics firm ComScore's newly released figures for February.

That's most dramatically reflected in Spain, where Facebook's reach has grown tenfold over the course of only a year and is now in the No. 1 spot

In fact, ComScore said Wednesday, the only countries where Facebook isn't the No. 1 or No. 2 social network are Germany, where it ranks fourth; Russia, where it's seventh; and Portugal, where it's third. Facebook's biggest stronghold in Europe is still the U.K., where it has 22.7 million active users, followed by France with 13.7 million.

Facebook began offering translated versions of its site in January 2008, and that's when growth really began to speed up in many European countries. It didn't always catch on rapidly, as there were many existing regional social networks that already had significant reach in countries like Germany, where a site called StudiVZ is so popular and so similar to Facebook that rumors spread that Facebook had tried to buy it.

In Europe, use of Facebook now takes up 4.1 percent of total Internet browsing time, up from 1.1 percent a year ago.

Ironically, Facebook--which recently hit the 200 million member mark--is still not the top social network in the United States. News Corp.'s MySpace still holds that spot, though some say Facebook will pass it next year if it sustains current growth rates.

Nielsen's five fastest-growing community sites in the U.S.

(Credit: Nielsen)

A small new survey from Nielsen about the five fastest growing "member community destinations" in the U.S. reveals what we all kind of knew already: Twitter is at the top. From February 2008 to February 2009, it clocked in at a whopping 1,382 percent growth rate. That's to be expected, considering the amount of press the still-without-a-business-model microblogging service has gotten in recent months.

In third place is Facebook, with 228 percent growth year-over-year according to Nielsen. That's not terribly surprising, as Facebook is still growing in the U.S. but not quite as exponentially as it once was.

There are, beyond that, a handful of interesting things to note. Two of Nielsen's top five, for example, aren't social networks but rather wiki creation services: Zimbio (240 percent growth) and Wikia (172 percent growth). And in fourth place is Multiply, which probably got a surge of activity when it recently acquired the MSN Groups service that Microsoft was spinning off.

But a blog post from Nielsen said that Twitter (which counts the 35-to-49 age demographic as its biggest, the statistics said) may be growing even faster than its numbers say. "PC Web usage of Twitter.com doesn't tell the whole story," the post by Nielsen Online's Michelle McGiboney read. "The ability to (use) Twitter via a mobile phone--whether through the mobile Web or via text messages--is a driving factor in the social network's success. In January, 735,000 unique visitors accessed the Twitter Web site through their mobile phones. The average unique visitor went to Twitter.com 14 times during the month and spent an average of seven minutes on the site."

An additional 812,000 users accessed Twitter via text message on the AT&T and Verizon carriers alone.

(Credit: Compete.com)

Unless you have been inhabiting the underground bunker formerly occupied by Dick Cheney, you've probably seen loads of press coverage over a "25 Things About Me" Internet meme that was spreading on Facebook. Basically, members would create a Facebook "note" containing 25 facts about themselves, and then "tag" 25 friends encouraging them to do the same.

Yes, it was a bona fide phenomenon, but I avoided writing about it, because I thought the whole thing was...dumb. Internet memes of that nature have been around since goodness knows when. Breathless press hype over it seemed a tad silly.

But here's something legitimately interesting. Analytics firm Compete.com says that there may actually have been a boost to Facebook traffic as a result of "25 Things," at least in the U.S.: 60 percent more Facebook profiles were created in January than in December. That's not surprising, because Facebook still requires a user account to access all its content--curious newcomers who read about "25 Things" would need to register for accounts in order to explore it.

More noticeably, U.S.-based traffic to Facebook's "notes," normally one of the social network's quieter features, skyrocketed. Four times more visitors than usual hit up the notes feature in January, according to Compete, with 28 percent of Facebook's U.S. users checking them out. (The wildly popular photo-album feature usually draws 60 percent of visitors, for comparison.)

The caveat is that Facebook continues to grow fast and so some of this could be attributed to natural growth rather than "25 Things" momentum. That said, Facebook's U.S. growth has long since started to stabilize--three-quarters of its new users now come from overseas.

Compete has said that its analysts will be posting a blog entry about this later in the week, ideally with some more insight into just how much those annoying "25 Things" lists really did catch on. I've also pinged Facebook to see if they have any internal numbers on the topic.

Here's what'll be interesting to see, at least from my perspective: Will this mean that the newfound popularity of "notes" will last? I post photos, links, and other share-able items to my Facebook profile all the time, but I think I've written a Facebook note a total of once (to alert my friends list that I'd lost all their phone numbers in a personal-electronics mishap). Note-writing always struck me as something that was a little bit too promiscuous for the mainstream Facebook user, the sort of thing that navel-gazing, overshare-prone Twitterers would spring for but which didn't fit in quite as well with the directory-like nature of the social network.

Guess I was wrong. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, after all, likes to say that Facebook has incrementally made the Web's masses more comfortable with sharing more and more information. The success of "25 Things," consequently, must be one of his great triumphs. And now he knows all these useless facts about so many millions of people.

Heaven forbid: Facebook notes could be like a gateway drug to blogging for everyone.

This post was expanded at 9:51 a.m. PT.

(Credit: Compete.com)

The blogosphere simply loves to slurp up social-networking traffic stats, and on Monday we got a nice tasty serving of them with some new numbers from Compete.com for the month of January. The results? Facebook is in the lead, with about 68 million unique visitors, well ahead of MySpace's 58 million. (The two are pegged at 1.1 billion and 810 million page views, respectively.)

This may be the first survey we've seen that puts Facebook ahead of the News Corp.-owned MySpace in U.S. traffic. It also puts Twitter as the third-biggest social-media site in the country by total page views, with only about six million unique visitors but a whopping 54 million views.

Compete's numbers are interesting, because they often are pretty different from other analytics firms'. Here are some clarifications, explained to CNET News in an e-mail sent by Compete's Andy Kazeniac: These are numbers stemming entirely from Web browser data in the U.S. That means that you won't be pulling in any international numbers, where most of Facebook's users are now, or data from widgets or third-party applications, which are how many avid Twitter users access the service. That means that it's likely that Twitter's reach is bigger than the numbers indicate.

What's also intriguing is that there are a few social-media sites, like Flixster and LiveJournal, with relatively low unique visitor counts but proportionally very high page view counts, indicating that they probably have smallish bases of very loyal users.

Also pulling in notable numbers are LinkedIn, with about 11 million unique users, Classmates.com, with about 17 million, and Reunion.com, with slightly under 14 million. On the other end? AOL's Bebo, an $850 million purchase, which Compete.com clocks in as having just shy of three million unique visitors. True, its biggest user bases are in the U.K. and Ireland, but that's not good considering the price tag.

Still, statistics are like tequila shots. Always take 'em with a few grains of salt and a slice of lime, and be warned that they may give you headaches.

Facebook is still growing like wildfire: earlier this week, the social network put out stats that peg its active-user count at 140 million.

Inside Facebook blogger Justin Smith compared this to the date that Facebook said it hit 130 million members, and estimated that Facebook must be growing by a whopping 600,000 or 700,000 users per day.

We've checked in with Facebook to see if it has an official comment on that estimation; earlier this year, the company's network was growing by 250,000 users per day.

Statistics firms like Nielsen, ComScore, and Compete.com all have found Facebook's U.S. user count to be between 47 million and 50 million--still smaller than the 60 million-ish U.S. visitors that rival MySpace pulls in. But Facebook's growth is primarily overseas now, and its international pull is responsible for those skyrocketing numbers.

This brings back that persistent blogger pundit question: can Facebook's revenues keep pace with that kind of growth?

Especially overseas, server power can be costly. Facebook has raised a ton of venture capital, is reportedly hunting for more, and says it's in good financial shape. That comes back into question, however, if it's growing faster than it ever expected to.

Online advertising is starting to feel the effects of a tepid economy, industry analysis firm PubMatic said in a release Tuesday.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)

Based on data from "billions of ad impressions" and several thousand online publishers in its AdPrice Index, PubMatic asserted that clicks per thousand monetization rates (CPMs) dropped between March and April, using it as an indicator that the economic slowdown has begun to hit the online ad industry. Large Web sites (over 100 million monthly page views) are feeling the pain, the firm said, with monetization dropping 52 percent from 38 cents in March to 18 cents in April. Medium-size Web sites didn't change much over the same time period. Smaller ones (fewer than 1 million monthly page views) actually showed an improvement in monetization, rising from $1.18 CPM in March to $1.29 in April.

But overall, PubMatic found, monetization has dropped 23 percent. The problem may be the rise of social-media advertising, which major figures in the tech industry have admitted yields weak click-through rates. PubMatic's results said that CPMs plunged 47 percent, from 37 cents in March to 19 cents in April.

Here's another potential culprit: PubMatic has only been releasing monthly AdPrice Index reports for two months. Tuesday's results are consequently a comparison between months one and two. The firm's methods are still young enough so that error could be playing a role; we'll have to see if the numbers are showing the same trends later in 2008.

But PubMatic isn't the only one. In March, market research firm eMarketer lowered its online ad spending forecast for the year.

Did your site's Alexa ranking change overnight? That's because on Thursday, the chart-friendly Web analytics company announced an overhaul of its rankings system.

Alexa, according to a company announcement, now "aggregate(s) data from multiple sources" rather than just the surfing habits of those who'd installed its browser toolbar.

"Alexa toolbar users' interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our Web site," the announcement explained.

TechCrunch's Duncan Riley, for example, pointed out that the "old Alexa" statistics had TechCrunch's "reach" comparable to the news powerhouse Drudge Report, which has now taken a considerable lead.

Because of the new method of tabulating analytics, Alexa data now goes back only nine months. The company says it is "recalculating historic traffic data and will continue to add it over the coming weeks."

It might have been fine back in 1998 for Alexa, bought shortly thereafter by Amazon.com, to track traffic only from users who manually installed a piece of software. But a decade later, it's led to punchline status and a reputation for unreliability--and more competition.

Rivals such as Compete.com, as well as more formal analytics firms (read: ones where you can't just type in a few URLs and get a pretty graph) like Hitwise and ComScore, have tightened the market.

Even with the new rankings system, Alexa would not allow me to rank Alexa.com alongside other sites, specifically Compete.com. But Compete.com would: It shows that a year ago, Compete was far behind Alexa in traffic, but now the two are neck and neck.

Kara Swisher at All Things Digital reported on Thursday night that Facebook held an all-hands meeting earlier in the day to talk company finances--and that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was remarkably candid.

The 23-year-old executive announced that projected revenue for 2008 had been elevated from $300 million to $350 million; that's a big jump up from its 2007 revenue of $150 million. For better or worse, the privately held company plans to spend $200 million this year on capital expenditures (as Swisher puts it, "a whole lot of servers"), and Facebook's employee headcount is expected to rise from about 450 to over 1,000.

The company's EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), according to Swisher's report of Zuckerberg's speech, will be about $50 million for 2008. With $200 million in capital expenditures, that means the company has a negative cash flow of $150 million. Numbers like that are the sort of thing that a more seasoned CEO might think twice about discussing semi-publicly; the dial-in number for remote access to the event was accessible enough that Swisher was able to listen in.

We're also at a point where confidence in social-media business models isn't exactly at a high point. Google's fourth-quarter earnings report on Thursday revealed that its advertising deal with Facebook rival MySpace.com hasn't been so lucrative.

Still, Zuckerberg has reason to be confident--for the time being. The young company is full of investor cash, including $240 million from Microsoft, that pegs Facebook at a staggering $15 billion valuation. Expect the IPO chatter to continue.