Well, I hate reporting this, seeing as though this is Social Platform Journal and all 🙂 but the web analytics outfit comScore says that social networks are staring to lose their appeal, particularly MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and even the social network darling Facebook.
From Creative Capitol:
But the pain is not just a MySpace problem. It seems to be an industry-wide issue. The total audience of U.S. social networks seems to be stuck at a low-to-mid-single digit growth rate, while the engagment metrics are falling for just about everyone. Time spent on Bebo.com has been sliced in half over the last four months, while Friendster’s time spent has plummeted nearly 75% in the same time period. Overall, minutes spent per site fell 5% in December 2007 compared to the year-ago period.
One thing that I have noticed is that there is a lot of overlap with social networks. You may sign up for all of them, but do you really used all of them on a daily basis? For myself, the main social networks I use are Twitter and Facebook. There are only so many hours in the day, and lots of times you just end up having similar friends lists at each platform anyway.
So, to me, these numbers are not surprising, but I don’t think they predict the imminent demise of the social network industry. I think we just have the same groups of folks hopping from one network to the next, and it’s inevitable that sometimes the numbers will drop or not be rising as quickly as before.
What do you think?
Source: The Register
