Alexa gives us a quick barometer of the where the social networks sites are in the relation to the rest of the web.
As of December 10, 2003, we see:
Consumer-Oriented Social Networks:
Craigslist – 114 (ranking of overall trafficked site on the Internet)
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=craigslist.orgEmode/Tickle — 149
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=emode.comFriendster — 157
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=friendster.comHotOrNot — 381
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=hotornot.comTribe — 7,216
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=tribe.net
Business-Oriented Social Networks:
Plaxo — 3,087
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=plaxo.comSpoke — 25,190
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=spoke.comGoodContacts — 45,810
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=goodcontacts.comZeroDegrees — 92,122
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=zerodegrees.comLinkedIn — 146,747
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=linkedin.com
Overall — this is a really impressive showing …. by contrast, Summation is over 1,000,000 — so we are not even on the map:(
I’m very surprised Spoke has more traffic than GoodContacts — which has been around for a very long time.
Note that the plaxo stats do not reflect most of our real web traffic since it takes place over SSL. More importantly, most of our social networking traffic occurs via our client-server software which is not tracked either. This is probably true for Good Contacts and others as well.
CreatorCo.com is not on the list… and I second Rick’s comments regarding SSL.
Please note that we turned off server assisted mailing as the default mailing option in November, therefore, the majority of GoodContacts Enterprise customer mailings do not flow through our server. i.e. the GoodContacts traffic stats are not a good a comparative barometer of our social networking business.
LinkedIn uses SSL for all user sessions, so the number above only reflects people looking at our home page and are trying to decide whether or not to join (probably just 2% of our usage).
I think a better yardstick are the number of registered users (not uploaded email addresses, but people who signed up). The best yardstick is probably the number of successful referrals (contact requests) made since that is what networking is all about.
BTW, Alexa shows that Spoke’s related entries are for mountain biking, so there might be soemthing else going on 🙂
Interesting, I wondered what they look like now:
Traffic Rank for craigslist.org: 26
Traffic Rank for myspace.com: 7
Traffic Rank for linkedin.com: 12,106…