Report: Social networking up 83 percent for U.S. [CNET News]
Over the past year, the amount of time that Americans spend on social networking sites has increased 83 percent according to a new report from Nielsen Online. The report indicates that Facebook grew by nearly 700 percent in the total amount of time that users have spent on the site in the previous year, surpassing MySpace, the leader in last year's survey. Users spent over 13.9 billion minutes on Facebook during April of this year, compared to just 1.7 billion minutes in April of 2008. That compares to around 5 billion minutes spent by users of MySpace in April, 2009.
The most remarkable growth among social networking sites (despite the fact that the growth rate was based on such a small starting point) came from Twitter , which grew a whopping 3,700% in the number of minutes user's of the microblogging site spent using it over last year. It now stands at fifth overall among all social networking sites in that metric.
Jon Gibs, Nielsen's vice president for online media and agency insights explained the major story lines.
"We have seen some major growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace. Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space."
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