2009 has been a booming year for social network sites. Nielsen data show that SNS and blogs have become the 4th most popular online activity, ahead of email. The time spent on social network sites is growing 3 times the overall internet rate, accounting for almost 10 % of all internet time. TopTenReviews created a top ten of social network sites. Leader in this list is Facebook, followed by MySpace. Bebo completes the top three and is followed by Friendster, hi5, Orkut, Perfspot, Yahoo! 360, Zorpis and Netlog. The sites were compared on a couple of criteria, such as profiles, security, networking features and legitimate friend focus.
TechCrunch examined the social network sites in terms of users. Again we see that Facebook finishes first. According to TechCrunch however, this distribution does not take into account the real value of the social networks. Users in high-value online advertising markets are worth more than those in low-value advertising markets. Therefore TechCrunch measured the value of social network sites in terms of users and advertising. In 2008 MySpace exceeded Facebook, but this year we see Facebook fighting back. Today this popular SNS is worth $10 billion, while MySpace is only worth $6.5 billion. Bebo ($1.8 billion), Twitter ($1.7 billion) and LinkedIn ($0.8 billion) completed the top three. TechCrunch also calculated that Facebook accounts for 37% of all social networking value points. This means that if Facebook is worth $10 billion dollars, the value of the entire social network industry is $27.1 billion.
Since we are creating a social network site called DinnerDate, we can deduce some conclusions from these statistics. The criteria picked by TopTenReviews seem like a good starting point when choosing our priorities. Focus has to be on the profile, security and networking features. Furthermore, we also see that a lot of money can be made in the social network industry.
So, the goal for us at DinnerDate for 2010 is to take over a small piece of the social network pie by attracting a lot of users and advertisers.
