Social Networking Visits Increase

According to Hitwise, visits to social networking sites increased more than 10% from January to February 2007, to account for 6.5% of all Internet visits in February 2007. Myspace and Facebook, the category leaders, grew by 10% each and maintained a clear lead with 81% and 10% of the social networking traffic, respectively. Myspace was such a dominant leader that 25% of the traffic to the other top 19 social networking websites originates from Myspace. "While MySpace is still by far the dominant social networking website, sites like Buzznet and iMeem are succeeding in building communities around music and other media," said LeeAnn Prescott, director of research at Hitwise, "The social networking category will continue to grow as new sites emerge with unique offerings." The other social network sites rounding out the top ten were Bebo, BlackPlanet, Xanga, iMeem, Yahoo!360, Classmates, hi5 and Tagged.

Although government and school officials have tried to ban or limit social networking, the growth seems inevitable. Along with the traffic increase there have been demographic changes as well. Over 40% of the adult users of Myspace are over 35, and all 2008 U.S. presidential candidates even have Myspace pages.