ReadWriteWeb

US Web stats company Compete has some interesting analysis on how Social Networking sites compare to portals. From a sample size of around 2 million US people, Compete concludes that social networking sites are quickly approaching the traffic level of the big portals like Google and Yahoo. Their key findings:

1. In June, 2 out of every 3 people online visited a social networking site

2. Since January 2004, the number of people visiting or taking part in one of the top online social networks has grown by over 109%

3. Social networking sites are now close to eclipsing traffic to the giants - Google and Yahoo

They liken the growth of SNS to email in the 90's. A couple of charts from Compete:

Given my recent coverage of international markets, it'd be interesting to see how the likes of Bebo fits into this picture - as Bebo recently overtook MySpace as the top SNS in the UK. Compete's stats are US-only, but in any case it's clear that all trends point to SNS sites overtaking the Internet portals - sooner rather than later.

Digg.com is not only a thriving community and great source for news, it's also an increasingly influential website for bloggers and website owners. It can be a heavy driver of revenue-generating traffic and can also help make your website viral (= popular). Given its growing importance then, I thought I'd investigate digg's stats and identify the main trends. Let's look at the official dig.com stats first, then turn our attention to a new (unofficial) site call duggtrends.

Top Diggers data 

A page on digg.com called Top Diggers shows that a select group of digg users are highly influential. These top diggers have a higher chance of getting a story digged to the homepage than other users. Unsurprisingly Kevin Rose is right at the top, with a whopping 119 of his 120 submitted stories making it to the homepage (he has a 99% "Popular Ratio")! What was the single story that *didn't* make it, I wonder? 

If you order the results by 'Most Submitted', you'll note that a number of these heavy submitters have high Popular Ratios. Albertpacino has a 31% ratio (800 of 2570 submitted), BloodJunkie 26%, gwjc 24%, digitalgopher 36%, dirtyfratboy 37%, and so on. All of these folks have submitted over 1000 stories. I'm pretty unsurprised by these figures however, because it is a community site after all. So it's only natural that friends will digg each others stories. 

Top digg blogs and sites 

Digg users also have their favored blogs and websites, which get a disproportionate amount of attention than other less fortunate sites (alas, I'm one of the latter). For example, AppleInsider has had at least 4 homepage diggs in the past week. A lot of times, the favored sites get dugg very very quickly by digg users. The main problem with that is that the original source for a story often gets overlooked - and the popular site garners all the diggs instead. I speak from recent experience :-)

Most digged days

A site called duggtrends (but the URL is diggtrends.com!?) is tracking other digg data. According to duggtrends' stats, Sunday is the least active day and Thursday the most active. Apparently most of the digging by users happens during office hours, US time. So duggtrends estimates 9:00 AM EST as the best time to submit a story. 

Stories to frontpage ratios

Duggtrends says the percentage of submitted stories that make it to the digg homepage during the week is around 15-19% (using Wed-Thu as a guide). However those particular stats in Table 1 don't seem to correlate to the much lower 'stories-to-front-page' ratios in Table 4??

Categories

Duggtrends also analyzes the new categories, introduced when digg version 3 was released. Unsurprisingly, "Tech Industry News" still dominates - it had 2184 stories submitted to it in one week - "World News" was the second-most popular category with 1287. But note this comment from duggtrends:

"Stories submitted in this category probably will have fewer chances to make it to FrontPage. Most of the time these stories get pushed back in Upcoming Stories within few minutes."

Indeed the stats do show that only 120 of the Tech News stories made it to the homepage (just 5.5% of the stories submitted to that category). 

Over time, as digg V3 matures, we may see the non-tech categories increase in popularity. Certainly digg's owners will be hoping so.

Summary

So an interesting look at the world of digg. If you have further digg data or anecdotes to share, feel free to leave a comment. Oh and for the love of TBL, will someone please digg this post! ;-)

Yahoo has issued a rather hoity-toity response to Hitwise's stats that claimed MySpace is now the number 1 domain on the Web. Sniffs Yahoo in its official statement:

"The report that Hitwise released today with the headline “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites” is misleading. The Yahoo! network is made up of many domains and it is not accurate to compare MySpace.com to just Yahoo!’s mail.yahoo.com domain. When taking into account all of Yahoo!’s domains together as an entire network, Yahoo! clearly remains the number one property in terms of audience share, duration share, page view share and days visited per month."

The statement goes on to assert that Yahoo! gets 129 million unique visitors per month in the US, "which represents 74 percent of the online population". Itsy-bitsy MySpace on the other hand, "reaches only 30 percent". But wait, Yahoo's not finished reprimanding Hitwise just yet. "In addition", the Yahoo statement points out, "Yahoo! has the largest share of online time spent than any other property: Yahoo! accounts for 13 percent of users’ online time, while MySpace has only 3.2 percent share in users’ online time."

So there: nya nya naa naa na! Incidentally Yahoo's stats were pulled from comScore Media Metrix's June report (a Hitwise competitor).

But in all seriousness, Yahoo! does have a point that it is still "the world’s most trafficked Internet destination online". To suggest otherwise is a little disingenuous. Yahoo blogger Jeremy Zawodny goes further, saying that Hitwise's post "feels a lot like Hitwise trading their credibility for some cheap press headlines."

To be fair, what Hitwise claimed was that MySpace was "the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users" (emphasis mine). So technically, according to Hitwise's data, that's a true statement. But as Jeremy said, it's a bit of a headline-grabbing statement and open to misinterpretation.

So anyway, as long as we're all clear now - Yahoo is the number 1 Web property.

According to the Miniwatts Marketing Group's Internet Usage and World Population Statistics (last updated March 31, 2006), worldwide Internet penetration is only 15.7%! So much for the World Wide Web... this is indeed sobering stuff for those of us obsessed with 'web 2.0' technology. Here's the main table of stats:

Source: World Internet Usage Statistics and Population Stats (nb: removed two columns to make it fit)

In North America, where most Web innovations still come from, the penetration figure is 68.6%. However in Africa it's just 2.6%, Asia 9.9% and the Middle East 9.6%. Together Africa, Asia and Middle East make up 73.4% of the world's population. So that basically means 3/4 of the world has extremely low Internet penetration. The one positive note is that usage growth rates are encouraging (see column on the right). 

Interesting to note that China, seen by most analysts as a big growth market for Web technologies, has an Internet penetration of only 8.5%. Considering that great parts of China are rural, this isn't overly surprising. Also mobile technologies have a much bigger impact in China, than the PC. 

Still, these figures put things into perspective. I feel very lucky to live in a country (New Zealand) that has 76.3% penetration - even if the broadband is slow and expensive!

p.s. amazing how in these circumstances Pete Cashmore has managed to get 5 billion RSS subscribers ;-)

One more quick post for the day, before I go and watch the rugby (go Canes!). Hitwise has done a table showing relative popularity of the Google properties:

Compare this to Alexa's breakdown:

- google.com - 75%
- mail.google.com - 8%
- images.google.com - 8%
- groups.google.com - 2%
- video.google.com - 2%
- news.google.com - 1%
- froogle.google.com - 1%
- Other websites - 3%

Pretty close and shows really that Google has a lot of work to do in its 'verticals'.

There's been a lot of talk recently about Josh Kopelman's post, in which he wrote:

"As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience."

Paul Kedrosky and Om Malik have great follow-up posts. All of this talk actually coincided with my own review of Read/WriteWeb. I've been delving into my server and Measure Map stats in an effort to identify what's been popular on my blog this year - and what topics my readers like the best. Also recently I got the results of the FM Publishing survey I had on my blog -- and turned out my results were pretty similar to those of Techcrunch. Here are Techcrunch's results, with mine in brackets:

Audience:
· 89% male (RWW = 84%)
· 81% 18-39 (RWW = 71%)
· 50% HHI [household income] above $75k  (RWW = 45%)
· 39% Director level or above (RWW = 39%; with 60% being manager level or above!)
· 55% IT professionals, developers, engineers, or consultants (RWW = 63%)
· 60% publish their own blog (RWW = 68%)

I can tell you that most of the FM blogs have similar stats. Some of them have a more broader audience (e.g. BoingBoing), but there are a subset of FM blogs that have an overwhelmingly male, Gen Y/X, rich, manageriel/executive, IT-based and geeky audience. They include Techcrunch, GigaOm, A VC, Buzzmachine, Read/WriteWeb. The predominance of male readers (and writers) for these blogs is actually pretty worrying and probably sums up how narrow a niche audience this is.

Here are the main summary stats for Read/WriteWeb, from my FM survey:

- 60% of my readers are decision-makers (manager level or above)
- 92% are early adopters of technology
- 60% are computer professionals or consultants

I take that as meaning Read/WriteWeb is successful in providing the information it sets out to: web/media product analysis, market positioning, industry trends and insights. That's the kind of information that decision-making early adopting, IT professionals need. So I'm glad I'm providing it. Indeed my challenge now is to get the full 53,651 people who need it, to subscribe to Read/WriteWeb as well as Techcrunch :-)

OK I do wish that the group of '53,651' people was more inclusive (more women, more over 40's, more non-IT people, etc). That's something we as an industry need to look more closely at. I know Susan Mernit, Dave Winer and others have been keen to have a more inclusive audience, so it's not as if we're ignoring the issue.

Any suggestions on what I can do at Read/WriteWeb to get a broader and more inclusive subscriber base? Tone down the geek-techie talk perhaps? More market research-based posts?

I've long been suspicious of some of the stats that certain companies and bloggers push. We all know by now that industry stats tool alexa.com must be taken with a grain of salt, but until today I hadn't realised the extent of how a site's own measured traffic can be exaggerated.

You see recently I've been using Urchin (owned by Google) web stats as part of my MediaTemple web hosting arrangement, along with statcounter.com which I've used for years. I've been noticing that Urchin page view stats are MUCH higher than statcounter.com - in fact 5 times higher! This difference has been bugging me and I wanted to find out why. Today I came across this interesting thread which explains all:

"At the raw, basic level, Urchin counts pretty much the same numbers as any web server log analysis program will do (much prettier). Every page read by a browser is counted as a page view; different IP addresses signify the individual visitors. That's not very accurate because robots and crawlers 'read' pages, too, and show up in the count (visitors and pages) by different web server log analysis programs, including Urchin. Robots and crawlers don't read Javascript."
(emphasis mine)

Products like statcounter.com, by comparison, only count page views from browsers with JavaScript enabled - which gets rid of the robots and crawler hits.

So in a nutshell, Urchin stats can be highly misleading. Although it must be pointed out there is an advanced version of Urchin that uses something called UTM, which is Urchin's version of a Javascript enabled count. From the above thread Urchin with UTM means:

"...visitors are cookied, tagged, etc. Then, both log data and JS data are combined in Urchin's reports. Without UTM, Urchin is just counting server log stats."

I wanted to bring this up because I've always used statcounter.com when I tell people my page views - when I'm looking for advertising, or trying to get into a network, etc. But I have a feeling other people may use Urchin or similar log stats when they're promoting themselves. Which would mean my stats don't compare well to theirs.

I've certainly heard some bloggers quote extraordinary stats in my time - and have been skeptical without quite knowing why. Well now I know and I think others should too: sometimes people promote their sites with stats that are grossly exaggerated. If you want REAL stats, you need to get their statcounter.com stats or the advanced Urchin with UTM ones. There, now I have that off my chest ;-)

The latest comScore Networks report states that total Internet spending reached $143.2 billion for the full year 2005, an increase of 22 percent from 2004. What's more, comScore Networks chairman Gian Fulgoni is quoted as saying: "It's clear based on what we're seeing so far in 2006 that the strength in online sales will not wane anytime soon."

Yahoo continues to be the top Web property, with 127 million unique visitors in December to its sites. MSN-Microsoft registered 116 M uniques, Time-Warner about the same, while Google was 4th with 93 M. Others in the top 10 were: eBay, Amazon, Ask Jeeves, Wal-Mart, Viacom Online, NY Times Digital. MySpace just missed out on the top 10, coming in at number 11 with 32 million uniques in December.

One thing that caught my eye: Wikipedia came in at number 37 with 17 M uniques - the only non-commercial site to make the top 50. On the other side of the coin -- retail sites such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy performed strongly in December, due to holiday purchases. Of course, these numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt (someone always pipes up in the comments about the accuracy of this type of data, but I always say - well show me better data then!).

Current Alexa data tells a similar story: Yahoo number 1, MSN-Microsoft number 2, Google number 3. AOL, Time-Warner's biggest Web property, is number 21. Which indicates that Time-Warner has a diverse set of big Web properties, as they're number 3 in comScore's list.

A USA Today article reveals that MySpace has now reached 47.3 million members. The Blog Herald also reports that MySpace "is growing by an amazing 160,000 new users a day, according to MediaPost".

USA Today gives a rundown of numbers for SNS sites, c/o comScore Media Metrix. They note that "in the past year, the number of visitors to MySpace (from homes, workplaces and colleges) has skyrocketed, making it the Web’s top social networking site":

MySpace.com
Nov. 2004: 4.9 million
Nov. 2005: 26.7 million

Facebook.com
Nov. 2004: N/A
Nov. 2005: 11.1 million

Xanga.com
Nov. 2004: 5.8 million
Nov. 2005: 7.9 million

Bebo.com
Nov. 2004: N/A
Nov. 2005: 1.5 million

Friendster.com
Nov. 2004: 966,000
Nov. 2005: 1.5 million

Tribe Networks Inc.
Nov. 2004: 62,000
Nov. 2005: 515,000

Linkedin.com
Nov. 2004: 123,000
Nov. 2005: 354,188

Orkut.com
Nov. 2004: N/A
Nov. 2005: 83,000

Source: comScore Media Metrix, a division of comScore Networks, Inc.

For some reason, USA Today didn't include LiveJournal in their chart. According to official stats, LiveJournal currently has 9 million user accounts - but only a little under 2 million are "active". That would put LJ at number 3 or 4 in the above chart.

The demographics of SNS sites are interesting. LiveJournal users are skewed to 16-20 years and are 2/3 female. MySpace is said to be mostly < 22 yrs and general consensus is that it's a younger user base than LJ.

All of these SNS services have a very young user base, so in many ways it's a battle for the hearts and minds of Generation Y and beyond. MySpace may be winning in numbers, but recent controversy shows they can't get complacent.

In my ZDNet column today I took a look at the top websites in the world according to Alexa. You might be surprised by what I found. Here is the current top 10 in terms of traffic:

1. Yahoo!
2. Microsoft Network (MSN) 
3. Google
4. Yahoo! Japan 
5. Baidu.com 
6. sina.com
7. EBay
8. Passport.net 
9. sohu.com
10. 163.com

Yahoo's dominance in Web traffic and reach comes through loud and clear, but perhaps more importantly this data proves that China is a huge Web market. There are 4 Chinese websites in the top 10 globally, compared to 5 US sites. The top 10 Chinese websites are in the top 35 globally, second only to the US in terms of Web presence. More details in my ZDNet post.