Social Network a US Phenomenon? Guess Again

In the USA it has become pretty standard stuff to assume that Social Media was a homegrown thing. Everyone speaks of Facebook as the gold standard - and let's face it - it just is.

But its not the only game in town.

There are some significant other players who have decent presence in their respective markets.

Here is a list of some of the other non-US Social Networking sites you might want to consider and their respective penetration as of the end of 2009.

CHINA: Qzone (also known as QQ) – 200 m users as of 31.01.09 , reportedly 300m as Dec 2009 , Main land China- more that 150 m monthly active users. Also Xioni and 51 are social networking services.

Friendster - 115 m users – 61m unique users per month and 19 billion pages views per month predominantly SE Asia Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India

Google/Orkut - *100 m users – 48 languages – 51.09 m user Brazil , 20.02m users in India , 17.28m user in US.

hi5 - 80m users – 50 languages, main demographics 18 – 34 ( 67% of users ) *15m Mexico, *10.5m Thailand, *7m Peru, *7m Portugal, India, Latam , big interest in developing social games and entertainment content

RUSSIA: Vkontakte - 61 m users- Russian (cyrillic ) speaking world inc. Eastern Europe ,

S. KOREA: Cyworld - *16.2 m users – 33% of total population of Sth Korea , 90% of Sth Koreans in their 20’s are members of Cyworld.

EUROPE: Bebo - 40 m users – languages English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Polish, also Netlog (Italy) and Tuenti (Spain)

GCC: Maktoob- 36 m users, Middle East, bought by Yahoo , Aug 2009 combining 16m Maktoob users with 20m Yahoo users, originally an email service that has extended into social network and news content

NL: Hyves – 9m users ,53% of total population of The Netherlands are registered users

HUNGARY: iWiW – 4m users, 40% of total population of Hungary are registered user through invite only


Facebook itself now claims 500 million users and also has developers in 180 countries worldwide. And don't forget MySpace still hanging in there.

For a good snapshot of Facebook go here.