Webware

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.

(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.

Recently, statistics firms haven't been too kind to MySpace, the News Corp.-owned social network that was at the center of Silicon Valley press love not so long ago. In June, ComScore reported that once-smaller Facebook had surpassed it in worldwide traffic for the first time.

But the news isn't all bad for MySpace, the company said in an e-mail Monday evening. ComScore statistics might be showing that Facebook is still growing rapidly, but the firm's numbers for July said that MySpace has surpassed 122 million unique visitors worldwide for the first time. Granted, it's been hovering between 100,000 and slightly more than 120,000 for the past year, but that's good to know it isn't shrinking.

Unfortunately for MySpace, ComScore now pegs Facebook at more than 144 million unique visitors worldwide.

Additionally, MySpace said, its Latin American traffic grew 10 percent month-over-month to 6.8 million, and Europe's visitors hit 30 million for the first time. International traffic is up from 53 million to 55 million unique visitors. In the U.S., where it still has a significantly larger foothold than Facebook, MySpace hit 75 million unique visitors for the first time. According to the same ComScore stats, Facebook is slightly less than 40 million in the U.S.

But MySpace has been trying to differentiate itself from the more directory-like "utility" Facebook of late, instead positioning itself as the heir apparent to MTV in pop-culture influence. It's no surprise that founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson are on the cover of September's Fast Company, spun as Hollywood moguls rather than dot-com entrepreneurs--their company will be launching MySpace Music, an ad-supported streaming music service, next month.

"As the stats from this month and previous months indicate, there's large upwards momentum ready for the MySpace Music launch," a release from the company declared.

That's a big deal. Music is at the core of MySpace's short history--it rose to fame as a promotional hub for indie bands--and that's one market share that Facebook hasn't been able to eat into.

We sort of knew it already: while Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut, and Friendster were all founded in the U.S., social networking is a worldwide phenomenon. New statistics from ComScore show that sites like Facebook are growing rapidly across the globe, even as that growth slows down in their home country.

Earlier on Tuesday, performance firm Pingdom released numbers pulled from Google Insights for Search, showing that different social networks have very different levels of "interest" across the world. ComScore's numbers, also released Tuesday, underscore the fact that social sites are increasingly global in nature--and sometimes unexpectedly.

According to ComScore's numbers, social-networking sites may be nearing a peak in North America. The industry's foothold in the U.S. and Canada grew only 9 percent from June 2007, but in Asia it grew 23 percent, in Latin America 33 percent, and in Europe 35 percent. And social networks grew a whopping 66 percent in the Middle East and Africa. The 9 percent growth in North America meant that it was the only region of the world where the growth of social networks did not outpace the growth of the Internet-using populace as a whole, which ComScore pegged at 11 percent.

The fastest-growing site is, not surprisingly, Facebook, with a 153 percent increase in unique visitors noted. Most of that growth is international--its domestic growth was estimated at 38 percent. Hi5, a San Francisco-founded site with a big foothold in Latin America, grew 100 percent. Friendster, another Bay Area social network, grew 50 percent thanks to a renewed interest among Asian audiences. Growing at 41 percent is Google's Orkut, at 32 percent is AOL's Bebo, and at 19 percent is Skyrock, a France-based social network that remains extremely popular among the youth in its home country.

News Corp.'s MySpace, still the biggest social network in the U.S., is not doing quite as well internationally. Its unique visitors have gone up only 3 percent year-over-year, ComScore said.

"Facebook has done an exceptional job of leveraging its brand internationally during the past year," ComScore executive Jack Flanagan said in a statement from the company. "By increasing the site's relevance to local markets through local language interface translation, the site is now competing strongly or even capturing the lead in several markets where it had a relatively minor presence just a year ago."

Facebook's internationalization strategy has consisted of leaving the single site intact but allowing members to translate it into the local languages of their choice. MySpace, with its focus more on media consumption rather than communication, has launched several dozen localized editions of the site instead.

MySpace representatives have said that the site's aim is to gain a long-term foothold across the world, not to be a hot global fad. At the same time, it's been engaging in high-profile marketing projects outside the U.S., and at this point it doesn't seem to have produced results yet.

(Credit: ComScore)

New numbers from metrics firm ComScore show that in May, the battle of the social-networking sites may have gained a new front-runner: Facebook appears to have surpassed longtime rival MySpace in worldwide unique visitors for the first time. ComScore representatives said that this began in April when Facebook passed MySpace by a hair, and widened in May.

Facebook, according to ComScore, pulled in 123.9 million unique visitors in the month of May, beating MySpace's 114.6, and 50.6 billion page views compared to MySpace's 45.4 billion. It's been a slow but steady upward climb for Facebook, which was founded by then-Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. The site was restricted to members with e-mail addresses from a handful of elite universities before gradually expanding to the general public and becoming a genuine Silicon Valley sensation when it kick-started the developer platform craze last year.

It was a very different story for MySpace, which was founded in 2003 and achieved mass-market success in a relatively short time by gearing itself toward independent bands and their fans.

MySpace, owned by News Corp. since 2005, nevertheless remains far ahead of Facebook in the U.S., where both companies are based. The same ComScore numbers found that MySpace has 73.7 million unique visitors in the U.S. versus Facebook's 35.6 million, and that neither site grew much in the past month. Other number-crunching firms show similar results: a Compete.com graph of the two, for example, shows MySpace's U.S. traffic shrinking a bit while Facebook's is growing steadily, but not astronomically.

This appears to confirm the common wisdom that Facebook's present growth is largely overseas. And that, of course, assumes that the numbers are accurate--online metrics firms, ComScore included, have been subject to plenty of scrutiny on behalf of Web companies and ad firms. Additionally, some of MySpace's overseas traffic does not come from the MySpace.com domain; its Chinese-language site, for example, is MySpace.cn. (ComScore representatives said later that its assessment of MySpace's traffic encompassed all the site's domains.)

In January, Facebook unveiled plans to provide translated versions of the site, something that MySpace has done since 2006 after first launching separate versions of the site for other English-speaking countries like the U.K. and Australia. There are now 29 localized versions of MySpace, and the company has office space in 20 different countries. MySpace representatives have explained in the past that their aim is to build communities centered on regional culture, not to simply expand the same networking tool worldwide.

But the Facebook strategy appears to be working, too. Numbers released by ComScore earlier this week about Facebook's growth in France suggest that the translated sites are having some positive effects in building international audiences. On Thursday, Chinese and Russian versions of the site debuted, bringing the translation offering to around 20 languages.

Overseas challenges
Still, even a fast-growing site like Facebook faces issues abroad. Ad dollars--typically stronger in the U.S. than overseas--still aren't rolling in on social networks the way many expected them to, and last month Facebook took out a $100 million loan to keep pace with growth. MySpace, meanwhile, just rolled out a site redesign that aims to make it more appealing to both users and advertisers.

Then there's the fact that while MySpace might be Facebook's chief rival in the U.S., there are plenty of other social networks with big followings in different pockets of the globe that pose local competition. Orkut, run by Google, has a lock on Brazil and also eats up a big portion of the market in India. Hi5 is big in Latin America. Friendster, long past popularity in the U.S., has nevertheless gained a sizeable following in several Asian countries.

And Facebook continues to work on image issues. The independently run company, its valuation pegged at a jaw-dropping $15 billion after an investment from Microsoft, has also been boosting its executive team to lift its reputation from Palo Alto start-up to legitimate international corporation. This spring, the company courted Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications and public affairs at Google, to join its roster in a similar capacity as a policy-focused PR czar.

This post was updated at 1:04 PM with comment from ComScore.

Online number-crunching firm ComScore announced Wednesday that it has acquired M:Metrics, a mobile usage statistics company, for $44.3 million in cash and a handful of common stock options.

The reason for the purchase is pretty obvious: as mobile phones make up a bigger and bigger chunk of digital consumption, ComScore wants to be able to provide the relevant statistics to businesses and advertisers. M:Metrics operates mobile phone usage survey MobiLens, mobile ad statistic tabulator M:Ad, and mobile Web monitoring product MeterDirect. ComScore currently has about 950 clients, the company said, and M:Metrics has more than 180.

"With the substantial growth of 3G devices and Internet friendly handsets, we believe we are now at an inflection point in Internet usage on mobile devices," ComScore CEO Magid Abraham said in a statement. "Our acquisition of M:Metrics makes ComScore an immediate market leader in this space and positions ComScore to deliver significant shareholder value."

Gaining access to additional measurement technology could also help ComScore deal with the fact that many businesses still don't trust Web usage metrics, which often vary significantly from one tracking firm to the next. The Interactive Advertising Bureau requested last year that ComScore, along with competitor Nielsen/NetRatings, go through an audit to scrutinize its measurement methodologies.

As part of the acquisition, which closed Wednesday, M:Metrics co-founders Will Hodgman and Seamus McAteer will become part of ComScore's management team.

All that time you waste at the office watching stupid cat videos on YouTube adds up: numbers released by ComScore on Wednesday indicate that U.S. Web users watched more than 10 billion online videos during the month of February. That's a 66 percent gain from the previous year.

Leading the pack, with a 35.4 percent share of videos viewed throughout the month, were Google-owned video sites--in other words, YouTube. The total video count for Google, according to ComScore, is about 3.6 billion, 3.42 billion of which were YouTube-specific. In a distant second place is News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media (MySpaceTV and its ilk) with 5.8 percent of the market.

Following Fox Interactive are a melange of big tech portals and media companies: Yahoo, Microsoft, Viacom, Time Warner (excluding AOL), Disney, AOL, ABC, and Comcast. Nowhere to be seen is Hulu, the joint video venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal--in February, it was still in private beta. It also doesn't include digital download marketplaces like iTunes.

But this could be the golden age of online video, in a sense: my colleague Greg Sandoval noted in his coverage of the National Association of Broadcasters conference that as digital video recorders and set-top boxes grow increasingly sophisticated, consumers may have more options for watching TV shows on demand and for watching content on TVs that's currently online-only.

On the other hand, ComScore's numbers don't seem to indicate that long-form TV shows make up a huge chunk of online video. The average video length, according to the statistics, was 2.7 minutes. And the average viewer watched 75 videos in the month of February, which seems to point to a lot of short clips.

What I want to know: How many of those YouTube videos had to do with Rick Astley?

There's been a lot of buzz this week about Facebook's traffic leveling off or declining, and naturally, it's been accompanied by schadenfreude over the fact that the hottest start-up in Silicon Valley may soon be losing its laurels.

Blog chatter, unsurprisingly, is at a fever pitch.

Earlier this week, the U.K. arm of audience measurement firm Nielsen reported that traffic from several social-networking sites, including Facebook, had dipped from December 2007 to January 2008. Now, numbers from ComScore (reported Friday on TechCrunch), suggest that Facebook's U.S. traffic may be in trouble as well. Graphs show unique visitors reaching a plateau, and with a small dip between December (34.7 million unique visitors) and January 2008 (33.9).

Facebook has not yet issued an official statement on the ComScore statistics.

It's inevitable that the explosive expansion that Facebook experienced in 2007 can't possibly go on forever. And since no hot new destination has popped up to potentially suck away Facebook traffic, the obvious conclusion is to blame it on social-networking fatigue. Facebook, one could say, is a trend and users have simply grown tired of it.

The argument makes sense. For many there was an initial novelty to keeping in touch with faraway friends and classmates, wasting time at the office with games and other developer-created applications, and voyeuristically sifting through online photo albums all on a single destination site. Me, I've grown tired of the Scrabulous gaming application on Facebook--it's way more fun to play word games in person.

But an apparent leveling in traffic doesn't equal mass account deletion. "Coolness factor" always fades; now it's up to Facebook to prove it can stay relevant and useful in its post-expansion era. Remember when instant-messaging client adoption was soaring and people were IMing each other just for the heck of it? We're all still IMing, but it's no longer a novelty, it's a utility. ("Utility," by the way, appears to be one of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's favorite words.)

And there are a few very important points to keep in mind when it comes to dealing with statistics. First, the ComScore numbers only point to U.S. traffic. It's clear that Facebook is aware that some of its best opportunities for growth lie overseas, as the company has launched a translation project to offer its site in foreign languages and hence appeal to a bigger base abroad. None of that international growth (in both English- and non-English-speaking regions) is reflected in the numbers.

Then there's the fact that some say you just can't rely on Web metrics. Many a new-media property, among them Major League Baseball's MLB.com, has complained that it's been tough to roll in ad dollars because traffic measurement firms like ComScore and Nielsen Online don't report numbers accurately. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which represents more than 300 digital publishers including CNET Networks (publisher of News.com), has asked those two firms to undergo an audit (currently in process) to explore discrepancies between their metrics and IAB members' internal server logs.

Either way, this shouldn't induce doomsday prophecies. Facebook's traffic may indeed be leveling off, something that should naturally happen after any site's phase of frenetic growth. Now it's up to the site to prove that it can stay relevant and useful to the base that it's already built up.