MySpace Receives 79.7 Percent of Social Networking Visits

May 22, 2007; 01:01 AM

According to Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, MySpace continued to dominate the social networking category in April 2007, with 79.7 percent of category visits. Following MySpace was Facebook with 11.47 percent of visits and Bebo with 1.28 percent of category visits. US Visits to MySpace increased by 70 percent from April 2006 to April 2007, while visits to Facebook were up 126 percent and visits to Bebo up 184 percent in that period.

Facebook opened up to accept Internet users without a school affiliation in September 2006. Previously it had been limited to those with a college or high school email address. From September 2006 to April 2007, the market share of visits to Facebook grew by 106 percent.

One in four visits (24.9 percent of upstream clicks) to the 19 other top social networking sites came directly from MySpace in April 2007, demonstrating the dominance of MySpace and indicating that many users maintain more than one social network. In April 2007, Facebook accounted for 2.85 percent of the upstream traffic to its 19 competitors, an increase of 185 percent compared to September 2006.

"Opening up to the entire Internet audience had a positive effect for Facebook" said LeeAnn Prescott, director of research at Hitwise. "Clickstream data indicate that users at other social networking sites may be experimenting with Facebook as an alternative site, which may help it attain critical mass among non-collegiate users."

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,200 global clients with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology captures the anonymous online usage, search, and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into our easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement, and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise is a privately held company headquartered in New York City and operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends and statistics, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence Analyst Weblogs at weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.