According to a Hitwise blog post last week, Web traffic to del.icio.us has more than doubled since the social bookmarking site was purchased by Yahoo in December of 2005.
Hitwise took a sample of 10 million Internet users in the U.S. and determined that the number of people visiting del.icio.us has jumped 122% from January to July. This growth is an encouraging sign, although del.icio.us still ranks only 6,793rd in the complete listing of sites visited.
The majority of those visiting the social bookmarking site are males between the ages of 25 and 34. Moreover, Web users who visit del.icio.us tend to be on the wealthier side. More than a third of these visitors make $100,000 to $150,000 per year per household. This is a good deal better than the 13% of all Web users who fall into this income bracket.
“Del.icio.us is highly skewed toward the social groups U1, ‘Urban Uptown,’ and S1, ‘Elite Suburbs,’” said senior research analyst at Hitwise, LeeAnn Prescott.
She added, “Members of these social groups have higher-than-average incomes and tend to be highly educated and are more likely to be early adopters of technology. My guess is that they’ve heard about del.icio.us through news media or through friends and are using it because it’s ‘the thing to do.’ This is not quite the MySpace crowd that I expected to find – instead del.icio.us users are a more sophisticated breed of Web power user.”
These findings highlight not just the financial opportunity that lies in the social network space, but more so the potential for targeted marketing opportunities. These prospects will only grow in prominence as further research reveals more and more information regarding the users of these social sites.
Other big social sites are seeing similar success in terms of growth. MySpace surprises no one by being the fastest growing social networking site (183%) and the top overall Web brand, although it may come as a shock to some that it is only 9th when it came to being the fastest growing site in the past year.
In a report released last week by Nielsen//NetRatings, it was reported that HSBC was the fastest growing Web brand, garnering 394% more unique visitors in July of 2006 than it did in July of 2005. However, sites focused on user-generated content such as ImageShack, Heavy.com, and Flickr grew at a faster pace than MySpace. Wikipedia was 10th on the list.
“User-generated content sites have seen significant growth over the past year, owing in large part to their reliance on viral marketing. They also benefit from their cost-effectiveness – the content is practically free,” said Jon Gibs, director of media analytics at Nielsen//NetRatings.
Gibs added that “MySpace is in a nearly unique position, because of its large audience base and its continued triple-digit growth. Only other popular user-generated content sites, such as YouTube, can rival it.”
So, if user-generated content sites are populating the tops of charts, and if other user-generated content sites are the only ones who can challenge these top dogs, it appears that social sites are in good shape.
Sources:
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2162210/social-bookmarking
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20060811CheckbooksReadySocialMediaBooms.html
http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/PR_060810.PDF
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