14 DAY TRIAL // The social networks market is generally characterized by important gaps in the year-over-year evolution of the most popular hotspots. Although still holding on to the global second place, the annual rate of growth that MySpace managed to achieve was of only 3%. However, some may say that growth is of good omen, no matter the percentage. Given that the most significant increase registered in the top 10 was of 153%, and that the number is attributed to Facebook, the network which now attracts in excess of 132 million unique users, the decline of MySpace becomes obvious.
"Facebook has done an exceptional job of leveraging its brand internationally during the past year," said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore, the company that provided the results. "By increasing the site's relevance to local markets through local language interface translation, the site is now competing strongly or even capturing the lead in several markets where it had a relatively minor presence just a year ago."
hi5, the third best website that brings friends together, also had a good year. From June 2007 to the same month of 2008, hi5 doubled its audience, reaching 56 million users. The localization strategy seems to have paid off for the second runner-up, as hi5 too was among the companies to introduce multi-language supported features in the abovementioned particular time span.
However, the development of these social networks cannot be attributed to North American or European users, as it would have been expected. The two markets had already reached a certain maturity, which means that the audience of Facebook, MySpace, Orkut or Friendster could not grow at an accelerated pace anymore. Instead, 1055% more Latin Americans became users of the social networks, while the Asia-Pacific growth was of 458%, topping the Middle East-Africa 403% increase in the number of people to become connected over the web.
"While the social networking trend first took off in North America, it is beginning to reach a point of maturity in the region," added Flanagan. "However, the phenomenon is still growing rapidly in other regions around the world - especially as the established American brands turn their focus to developing markets."