We love you. We love you not. Social network users are a fickle bunch.
Long long ago on Internet time - which is last year - MySpace was king of social networks. Nearly 75% of the time spent on social networks was on MySpace back in April 2008. Today, the honor of being the top social network goes to Facebook.
The social networking site, which was valued at $10 billion last week, saw minutes spent on its site surge 700% in April to 13.9 billion minutes in April of this year, according to Nielsen Online's latest report on social networking usage. Today, social network users spend under 25% of their time on MySpace vs. 66% of their time on Facebook.
Meanwhile, Twitter was the fastest-growing social network in April, with minutes spent online soaring 3700%.
Overall, time spent on social networks across the board jumped 83%.
Makes you wonder who's going to be king of social networks in April 2010.
“Remember Friendster? Remember when MySpace was an unbeatable force?" asked Jon Gibs, vice president, media and agency insights at Nielsen Online. "Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune. Consumers have shown that they are willing to pick up their networks and move them to another platform, seemingly at a moment's notice.”
Here are the top social networking and blog sites, ranked by total minutes for April 2009.
Company minutes '08 minutes '09 percent change
Facebook: 1.7 bln 13.9 699%
MySpace: 7.3 bln 5.0 - 31%
Blogger: 449k 583k 30%
Tagged: 30k 328k 998%
Twitter: 8k 300k 3712%
MyYearbook 131k 269k 105%
LiveJournal 55k 204k 273%
LinkedIn 120k 202k 69%
SlashKey n/a 188k n/a
Gaia Online 173k 150k - 17%
(Image source: itinual.com)
