The Social

AAAAAAHHHH! Here come the grown-ups!

You've probably heard it already: New numbers from iStrategyLabs indicate that in the apparent reversal of the plot of any '90s-era kiddie caper flick, grown-ups are taking over Facebook.

According to iStrategyLabs, from January to July of 2009, even though the population of Facebook members over the age of 55 grew 513.7 percent, the site now sees 16.5 percent fewer high-school users, and 21.7 percent fewer college users. Which, naturally, is cause for panic because when the cool kids leave it's all totally over. Or so the common wisdom says.

A BusinessWeek blog post has the right idea: Take a look at the methodology. iStrategyLabs did not actually survey Facebook members, it just looked at their affiliations. The downturn means that Facebook users are dropping their university and high-school affiliations, not that they're leaving the site per se. And that could mean one of a few things: as the BusinessWeek post points out, it coincides well with spring graduations from high schools and colleges, and some members undoubtedly drop those affiliations when they graduate.

Another theory that's been tossed around is that university and high-school affiliations can make it easy for administrators and teachers--not to mention parents--to keep tabs on kids and their shenanigans. Not joining networks can make a profile more incognito.

It's also important to note that these statistics come solely from Facebook's U.S. users, who now make up less than a third of its total membership.

And there's no related shrinkage shown in Facebook's age demographics that typically encompass high-school and college students--members under 17 are up 24.2 percent, and those aged 18-24 are up 4.8 percent. Just a smidge, but not a plummet by any means.

So this is a set of numbers to take with enough grains of salt to put around the rim of a margarita--but just think twice before you put the photo of you drinking that margarita on Facebook. Those sneaky adults could be watching.

Twitter's growth. Note the huge jump at the end--that's the Oprah effect.

(Credit: Hitwise)

Twitter's much-publicized appearance on Oprah Winfrey's talk show last week did a real number for the microblogging tool's traffic, a report from Hitwise indicates.

On April 17, the day of the show--when CEO Evan Williams appeared on-air and Winfrey herself began Twittering--a whopping 37 percent of visits to the Twitter.com home page were new visitors. That's a high number even for the fast-growing Twitter. Keep in mind that many avid Twitter users rarely even visit the home page, instead relying on desktop- or mobile-based third-party applications, so the jump might not look quite as drastic if you factor all those in. But it's still high: Hitwise says that in comparison, recent counts of new Facebook visitors as a percentage of overall traffic are more like 5 percent.

There's nothing particularly surprising about this, as the "Oprah effect" has been known to propel books to the top of Amazon's bestseller list almost instantly. It's more surprising that Twitter's servers, once notoriously volatile, stayed on top of things for the most part.

But what's really going to be interesting is to see how many of these curious new visitors come back regularly.

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.

So either Jon Stewart is really on to something with his mad-as-hell crusade against financial hypocrisy and stupidity, or there are a lot of unemployed people watching Comedy Central clips to pass the time.

Either way, an on-air freakout by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli may have been one of the best things to happen to Comedy Central in months: Fake-news pundits Stewart (of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart") and Stephen Colbert (of "The Colbert Report") have seen traffic to their Web sites and online video clips soar after the two went on mocking vendettas against Santelli, fellow CNBC personality Jim Cramer, and the NBC Universal-owned business network in general.

Traffic to the shows' Web sites has been at its highest of the year so far in the past week, at over 60 percent their weekly average for 2009. ComedyCentral.com, which hosts video clips of both programs, also had its best traffic of the year, and the digital version of a viciously funny clip called "CNBC Gives Financial Advice" logged over 1.3 million views in a week, the sort of numbers usually reserved for grainy videos of cats behaving unnaturally.

Here's the back story: Santelli was supposed to appear on "The Daily Show" after his tirade about the federal government's economic bailout, but backed out abruptly. That's when Stewart and Colbert--but especially Stewart--turned up the heat. Stewart went on the aforementioned anti-CNBC rant on March 5, putting "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer squarely in his crosshairs. Cramer appeared on "The Colbert Report" the following night.

Now, Cramer is scheduled to make a "Daily Show" appearance on Thursday night.

Stewart and Colbert have been two of the most visible figures in cable television's slow crawl onto the Web. Not only are they wildly popular with young and tech-savvy audiences, but the segmented format of their talk shows lends itself well to being split into short clips and swapped via video-sharing sites, which meant that unauthorized clips of the two were some of YouTube's earliest hits. That's what indirectly led to Comedy Central parent company Viacom's massive copyright lawsuit against YouTube owner Google.

Later on, the full archives of both shows were made available on Comedy Central's Web site, and recent episodes are available in full on Hulu (as well as iTunes and Xbox Live).

Colbert, who started out as a commentator on "The Daily Show" before spinning off his blowhard persona into his own talk show, also owes a big chunk of his notoriety to the Web. Video of C-SPAN's coverage of the White House Press Correspondents' dinner three years ago, in which Colbert performed a shockingly blunt comedy routine that skewered then-President George W. Bush, was a huge hit on the Web among those who wouldn't have considered actually watching C-SPAN in the first place.

Last year, Colbert was honored by the annual Webby Awards as "Person of the Year." Take that, nonbelievers!

(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.

(Credit: ComScore)

The blogosphere's love affair with Facebook-MySpace traffic wars just won't stop.

On Thursday, TechCrunch posted new statistics from ComScore that show Facebook now pulling in nearly twice as many unique visitors worldwide as its News Corp.-owned competitor.

About 222 million people visited Facebook worldwide in December (keep in mind that the social network pegs its active user count somewhere just north of 150 million these days) versus 125 million people for MySpace.

This comes less than two weeks after other ComScore statistics indicated that not only was MySpace still bigger in the U.S., it was way ahead in page-view count and time spent on the site.

But worldwide, the new ComScore numbers indicate that Facebook has a bigger edge on page views.

I have a headache now.

MySpace offered a statement in response, and it's not denying that it's been eclipsed in traffic:

We are laser focused on building a sustainable global business which we measure by profits and revenue--not just eyeballs. In a tough economic climate, our international revenue is up 30 percent year over year and we continue to focus on those markets with the strong monetization opportunities.

Additionally, MySpace continues to dominate the U.S. market--where the bulk of online advertising revenues reside--both in terms of monetization and user engagement with more than 76 million unique users and a 40 percent spike in engagement year over year.

MySpace does have a point. With News Corp.'s media muscle behind it, not to mention a stronger foothold in the U.S. and a willingness to use splashier advertisements (i.e. "wrapping" the homepage), it's not too hard to see that MySpace probably still has a notable edge in the advertising race.

(Credit: ComScore)

It's that time again: Measuring the traffic of the two biggest social-networking sites, Facebook and MySpace. Traffic firm ComScore has released year-end numbers that show the News Corp.-owned MySpace is still noticeably ahead in the U.S., but that Facebook's traffic is getting up there--however slowly.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has done some, uh, crunching: he estimates that at current growth rates, Facebook's U.S. audience will overtake MySpace's early in 2010.

The key point here is that the U.S. growth for both social networks has cooled down. Facebook's average monthly growth rate in the U.S. was 3.8 percent--its rapid growth these days is almost exclusively overseas--and MySpace's was 0.8 percent.

Other traffic firms, like Pingdom, have predicted that Facebook will pass MySpace in the U.S. much sooner. Facebook, with more than 150 million users worldwide, has been ahead in the global game for months now.

Arrington's probably not far off in estimating when Facebook will catch up in unique U.S. users. But he also notes that the more media-centric MySpace is way ahead in page views--40 billion in December (in the U.S.), compared to Facebook's 18 billion. MySpace also clocks up about twice as much time spent per visit, understandable for a site with a streaming-music service and a video portal. And it's been well-documented that MySpace's media consumption focus and stronger U.S. base have given it an edge when it comes to advertising.

The verdict? We still can't declare a winner, at least stateside.

The team at Pingdom, a firm that focuses primarily on uptime and performance, has posted a new blog entry estimating that Facebook will overtake MySpace as the top social network in the U.S. within a month or two. That's largely because, according to the same numbers, Facebook has doubled in size in the past year.

Several months ago, traffic firm ComScore noted that Facebook--a year ago far smaller than the News Corp.-owned MySpace--was starting to pass its rival in worldwide traffic. But in the U.S., which still has the big ad dollars, MySpace remained bigger.

There's something to note, though: Pingdom used Google Trends to make its assessment. Google Trends traffic data is one of only many sources of statistics out there, and it's collected primarily from people who have installed the Google toolbar. Numbers from Compete.com, for example, show that MySpace is still ahead.

Even according to Pingdom's numbers, MySpace doesn't appear to be shrinking. The performance firm thinks that could be due to a number of factors: that MySpace is continuing to recruit new users to replace those who may have left for Facebook, that people are using both social networks, or that Facebook is recruiting members who haven't been prior users of either site.

The good news for Facebook, according to new statistics from Hitwise, is that its traffic is up 50 percent in the U.S. since last August. The not-so-good news for Zuckerberg & pals? The same numbers say that News Corp.'s MySpace still owns a whopping 67.5 percent of the social-networking market in the U.S.

Hitwise gathered its data from an analysis of traffic to 56 different social-networking sites, and concluded that Facebook has gone from a market share of under 14 percent to slightly over 20 percent in the past year. MySpace, meanwhile, has seen a 10 percent decline in visits, which has pulled its share of the sector down from over 75 percent last year. These numbers, however, were tabulated well before this week's launch of MySpace's music service, which may well boost its traffic.

Behind Facebook and MySpace, Hitwise found that the third, fourth, and fifth most popular social networks in the U.S. are MyYearbook, Tagged, and the AOL-owned Bebo. None of them, however, has yet to bring in more than 2 percent of the U.S. market share.

Facebook vs. MySpace traffic comparisons are popular among data firms these days, withComScore announcing in June that Facebook had passed MySpace in traffic for the first time. But much of Facebook's growth is overseas, and everyone seems to be in agreement that MySpace is still the top social network in the U.S.

But Hitwise had some more news that might not be so good for either MySpace or Facebook: Visits to social networks overall were down 17 percent from August 2007 to August 2008.