The Social Media Traffic Update

Yup, it’s up. Latest ComScore data as reported on the ClickZ network shows an overall gain of 13% in unique visitors to social networking sites in 2008 vs. 2007, compared with a gain of 4% in total Internet audience. (Some of us remember when the total audience was growing double digits every year — yikes!  this Internet thing is maturing — digg down for the competition to heat up, folks!)

The details in the horserace are interesting. In the first place, nearly every social networking site they tracked had substantial gains for the year.  The biggest traffic sites continue to be #1 MySpace with a 10% gain and #2 Facebook with a 57% gain — which confirms our earlier post about how Facebook is taking it to MySpace.  Facebook is growing fast from a large base, and that’s impressive.

The only losers in the chart are Yahoo Groups (minus 13%), Webshots (minus 21%), and bringing up the rear, Windows Live Spaces (a whopping minus 57%).  Poor Microsoft.  Another loser.