According to a new study from Nielsen, Internet users spend more time on social networks and blogs in May 2009 than ever before. The total number of minutes increased 82% year-over-year. Unsurprisingly, Twitter saw the largest gain in total new users among social networks, with a 1,448% increase in visitors from May 2008 to May 2009. Users also started to spend far more time on Twitter in recent months. In May 2008, the average user spent about 6 minutes on Twitter.com, while this number has now grown to more than 17 minutes (Note: as far as we can see these numbers don't seem to take users who use third-party clients into account).
It is important to note, though, that Twitter's growth has slowed down dramatically over the last two months, as both the time per person spent on the site and Twitter's month-over-month growth only increased slightly since April 2009.
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Facebook and MySpace
Nielsen also released some new data about Facebook and MySpace. Interestingly, MySpace fired a large number of employees today, but Nielsen found that while Facebook is the top global social networking destination with over 144.3 million unique visitors in May 2009 that MySpace still seems to have at least once niche where it is performing exceptionally well: video. Nielsen found that MySpace still ranks as the top social networking site when ranked by video streams (116.1 million streams in May) and the number of unique video viewers on MySpace grew 22.9% month-over-month from April to May 2009.
