Social Web growth unabated

"Doubting the popularity of MySpace? Don't," suggests Digital Trends News. Citing new findings from Web traffic measurer Hitwise, the article says MySpace is getting 82% of visits to the top 20 social-networking sites and experienced 51% growth in visits between last March and this past September. Visits to social sites over all grew 34% those six months. In its report on the study, MediaPost cited other fast growers in social networking: "Other social sites making big gains in share of traffic include Bolt, up 271% [see this heads-up from a Bolt user]; Bebo, 95%; Orkut, 63%; and Gaia Online, 41%." In terms of average session time at the sites, Gaia Online came in first at 47 min., 1 sec., followed by CrushSpot (30:31); MySpace (30:22); Bebo (25:39); and Tagged (20:33). And of course MySpace's high traffic is spurring use of media-hosting sites (that MySpace users link to from their profiles) and sites that provide bells 'n' whistles for MySpace profiles. For example, "the top photo hosting site, PhotoBucket, increased market share by 43% from March to September, while Flickr grew by 49%. Visits to YouTube jumped 249% during that period [MySpace Videos grew 253%]. Slide, which lets users create slide shows of their photos and paste them on social networking sites, was the fastest-growing site in the category with a 1,300% gain in traffic" (see also "Embellishing their pages"). In other MySpace news, the service has serious international ambitions. This week MySpace launched in Japan (where indigenous social site Mixi just had a $1.85 billion IPO) and, "with a presence already in Britain, Australia, Ireland, Germany and France, the company plans to add 11 other countries in the coming year," the New York Times reports.