Growth of Social Networks (or Not)

By Ian, on January 27th, 2010

New data from Nielsen confirms what you probably already know. Traffic to and time spent on social networking sites has boomed over the last two years. As the charts below show, people across the world are spending around five-and-a-half hours per month on social networking sites compared to just over two hours at the end of 2007. Meanwhile, their reach has increased from 2bn to 3bn over the same time period. Note that when Nielsen say ‘global’, they actually mean 10 countries, only one of which might be classed as ‘developing’.

As you will be equally unsurprised to learn, Facebook remains the front runner, with 206mn unique visitors in December – 67% of all social media users.

While the rate of growth is impressive, there’s another side to these figures which is rather less so. Five-and-a-half hours over a month? Pathetic! People in the US spend four hours a day watching television.

Of course the figures are slightly meaningless, except as a comparison to the same measure over the previous period. The figure of 5h30 is arrived at by dividing all the time spent online by the number of people using social sites during that time. In truth, there’s probably a very stark differentiation between people who spend hardly any time at all on social sites and those who are never off them. Nonetheless, a bit of a reminder that social networks have quite some way to go before they rival more traditional media for consumption rates (although — interestingly — their reach is pretty similar).

Another interesting chart shows the differences in time spent across different countries. Australians appear to be the most socially active, with the Japanese bringing up the rear. Presumably interactions using mobile devices weren’t measured? We in the UK come third — another Bronze for the plucky Brits. I’d love to speculate further, but wouldn’t be able to resist national stereotypes.