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Buzz Watch: Facebook Gains Momentum, Both in the US and Abroad

Authored by Jay Baage on July 6, 2007 - 3:10am.
Stockholm, Sweden. “Everyone is on Facebook!” My friend is a banker in his 30's. This is one of the new trends in the Swedish capital city that he feels compelled to tell me about as we are catching up. “I spent like three hours on it yesterday and I keep on getting new invitations from people all the time”. His observation is supported by a fresh study by comScore that shows Facebook grew to 26.6 million unique visitors in the U.S. in May 2007, marking an 89-percent increase versus the same month last year.

Yes, you may say that the dramatic growth comes on the heels of Facebook.com’s decision in September 2006 to open up registration to the general public, a change from the previous policy requiring a valid email address from a university or a selected group of secondary schools and businesses.

But I think there is more to it. As college graduates start working, they invite their friends to join the network and as a result, the most dramatic growth occurred in the 25-34 year olds (up 181 percent) segment. This is a market segment that have not necessarily been active on an online social network before (i. e. they are not always converted MySpace users).

However, as DMW reported on earlier this week, U.S. teenagers who visit Facebook are more likely to be Caucasian, come from wealthy homes and be "popular" kids, while more MySpace users are from minority groups, get jobs right out of high school and are "socially ostracized," according to a somewhat controversial study from a UC Berkeley PhD student. From my friends' observations, this seem to be largely the case in Europe too. 

With the new Facebook Platform, which allows companies to build applications — and entire ad or fee-driven businesses — inside Facebook, the social networking site will probably gain even more momentum from MySpace in the future.

As many bloggers have noted, this is an interesting development, since Facebook is the anti-MySpace. MySpace has taken the old media, un-Google-like, un-Web 2.0 approach of trying to control all of the revenue, including blocking and, when necessary, acquiring third-party applications (e.g. Photobucket).

I agree with Scott Karp that Facebook now is the company to watch.

Joakim Baage

Flickr Photo credit: thescruffypirate

Published in DMW Daily, July 6, 2007
tags: Internet | Marketing | Advertising | Social Networking | MySpace | Facebook |



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