Data released by Nielsen//NetRatings on Thursday have confirmed what everyone already knew: social networking sites are continuing their rampage through the Internet and all its users.
The study indicated that the top 10 social networking sites have grown 47% over last year and that they have reached 45% of all Internet users. Unduplicated unique users for these top sites grew from 46.8 million in April of last year to 68.8 million in April of 2006.
The highly publicized MySpace continues its reign at the top with 38.4 million unique visitors and a year-over-year growth of 367%. Google’s Blogger social network was second with 18.5 million users and growth of 80% from last year. Classmates Online, YouTube, MSN Groups, AOL Hometown, Yahoo! Groups, MSN Spaces, Six Apart TypePad, and Xanga.com round out the top 10 social networking sites in April 2006.
Not only are these sites obtaining huge amounts of visitors, but they are retaining them as well. Of all of MySpaces visitors in March, 67% of them returned in April. MSN Groups, Facebook, Xanga.com, and MSN Spaces round out the top 5 in this department.
Source:
http://www.nielsennetratings.com/
pr/pr_060511.pdf
Digg 
