We've been talking about the increasing attention to and growth of social networking sites. Along with that is coming the increasing fragmentation of that specific online space. This post let's look at some of the sites and how they're growing.
While MySpace (NWS-A) will dominate social networking for a long time, the smaller sites are starting to take off in growth, according to Hitwise.
Just from January to February, Buzznet in up by 148.4 percent - and iMeem, a social multimedia site, is up by 145.7 percent. This doesn't mean that they are making huge inroads into MySpace territory as Buzznet has a 0.18 percent share and iMeem 0.73 percent, as far as visits to the sites go. MySpace on the other hand has an 80.74 percent overall share.
LeeAnn Prescott, director of research at Hitwise, said in the report: "While MySpace is still by far the dominant social networking Web site, sites like Buzznet and iMeem are succeeding in building communities around music and other media. The social networking category will continue to grow as new sites emerge with unique offerings."
Other than MySpace, only Facebook and Bebo have over a 1 percent market share. While we must keep in mind the small shares that some of these companies, at the same time if you get a few hundred of these started and that take hold, it could begin to significantly chip away at MySpace's share. No, I won't say it could, eventually it will. There's no way to stop it.
The one thing tricky about share though is because social networking as a whole is growing, MySpace will grow with it until things finally start levelling out. That may still be a couple of years away. If that's the case, many new sites will grow along with MySpace, without necessarily taking any share away from them, as the whole category will continue to grow.
For the overall social networking market, it grew by 11.5 percent from January to February, and 87 percent for the year. Still, even with those numbers it's still draws only 6.5 percent of all Web visits at this time
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