Flawed Data: Social Networks gaining on Top Portals?

By John M Grohol PsyD
August 16, 2006

What defines a “social networking” site? That’s a question you have to ask yourself when looking at Compete’s recent blog entry, Social Networks gaining on Top Portals.

Tickle, for instance, is a quiz site that glommed social networking components on to it after the fact. Is it now a “social networking” site because it has a social networking feature? Where do you draw the line? We have social networking features here at Psych Central, but I’d hardly call us a social networking site.

Three of the sites listed are blog hosting sites — Blogger, Typepad and LiveJournal. While certainly they have varying degrees of social networking components (LiveJournal more than the other two), they are really not quite in the same space as YouTube or MySpace.

And looking at the data, it would be more accurate to simply say, “MySpace traffic gaining on Google and Yahoo.” Because the vast majority of the visits from their dataset to social networking sites are to one site — MySpace (more than all of the other sites combined).

Of course, it’s just as interesting to note much stronger growth trends, as Nielsen//NetRatings did back on August 10, 2006. Wikipedia is growing nearly as fast as MySpace, but they are both being outpaced by Flickr and Heavy.com, among others. The site recording the largest growth spurt? Banking giant HSBC.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues, and the intersection of technology and psychology since 1992.