5 Facts about Social Networking Sites

At Pipl, we continually collect hundreds of millions of profiles from social networking sites for our People Search service.

Analyzing our freshly collected members profiles from November-December 2007, we came uppon some interesting facts that provided us with a glimpse into the Demographics, Trends, Size and Growth of the different sites:

1. The Women Are Younger, The Men are Older

This is the most consistent demographic characteristics across all social networking sites surveyed, the younger demographics is female dominant while the older demographic is mostly male.

The graph below demonstrates the gender distribution for MySpace, but this data is consistent for Bebo, Hi5, Facebook, Friendster, and Xanga as well.

2. Bebo and Xanga have the Youngest Crowd

While other social networks have a broader age demographics, member profiles in Bebo and Xanga consist mostly of teens and early 20's.

3. MySpace is still the largest, by far

With 184.1 million active member profiles, MySpace is still the largest social networking site.

Over the past 12 months, MySpace grew at a rate of about 157 member profiles every minute totaling about 82.7 million new profiles, this translate to 81.5% year over year growth.

4. European, Asians and South American Members are getting Younger

While the average age of new members in the US did not show any clear direction and in some cases it even showed an increase, the age of new members in other parts of the world is dropping rapidly.

The graph below demonstrates the gender distribution for Hi5 in Asia, but this data is consistent for Friendster, Myspace and in other regions as well.

5. More Women on MySpace, More Men on Hi5

Although MySpace gender distribution is almost equal, the new profiles are mostly Female.

The graph below demonstrates the gender trend for MySpace, while Hi5 shows the opposite trend.

There are many, many more interesting facts that we may have misses or did not include on this summary, please be our guest to find them using the different reports:

- Age Distribution
- Gender by Age
- Size & Growth
- Age Trend
- Gender Trend
- Geographic Trend