top 10 social networking sites in the world

This a list of the Top 10 social networking sites in the world. Social networking accounted for nearly 1 in every 5 minutes spent online globally, ranking as the most engaging online activity worldwide. Social networking sites now reach 82 percent of the world’s Internet population age 15 and older that accessed the Internet from a home or work computer, representing 1.2 billion users around the globe, according to a report from comScore, a company specializing in the measurement of the digital world. Other popular microblogging destinations seeing rapid adoption include Chinese site Sina Weibo, with its audience growing 181 percent in the past year to rank as the 10th largest social network in October. Tumblr, which ranked 12th worldwide in audience size, grew 172 percent in the past year.

10. Myspace

Alexa Traffic Rank: 157

Daily Pageviews: 7,739,424

Daily Unique Visitors: 2,687,300

Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace was founded in 2003 and was acquired by News Corporation in July 2005 for $580 million. From 2005 until early 2008, Myspace was the most visited social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors, and was surpassed in the number of unique U.S. visitors in May 2009.Since then, the number of Myspace users has declined steadily in spite of several redesigns. On June 29, 2011, Myspace was sold to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake for approximately $35 million.

9. Badoo

Alexa Traffic Rank: 117

Daily Pageviews: 163,090,752

Daily Unique Visitors: 2,464,000

Badoo is a social discovery website, founded in 2006.  It is managed out of its Soho, London headquarters but owned by a company in Cyprus and ultimately by Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev. The site operates in 180 countries and is most active in Latin America, Spain, Italy and France. Badoo ranks as the 52nd most popular site in France and the 117th globally, according to Alexa Internet. In July 2011, Badoo.com ranked as the 59th most visited website in the world with 46 million Unique Visitors per month, ahead of CNN.com in 60th position. Badoo grows by 150,000 new registrations per day.

8. Livejournal

Alexa Traffic Rank: 109

Daily Pageviews: 51,620,711

Daily Unique Visitors: 3,249,400

LiveJournal is a social network owned by SUP Media where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary – a wide variety of political pundits also use the service for political commentary, particularly in Russia. As with many other social networks, a wide variety of public figures use the network. However, LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community. LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities.

7. Pinterest

Alexa Traffic Rank: 43

Daily Pageviews: 186,523,596

Daily Unique Visitors: 7,661,500

Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, ‘re-pin’ images to their own collections and/or ‘like’ photos. Pinterest’s mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting” via a global platform of inspiration and idea sharing.
In January 2012 comScore reported the site had 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors, making it the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. comScore recorded a unique users moving average growth of 85% from mid-January to mid-February and a 17% growth from mid-February to mid-March. The site has been popular with American women and, in 2012, it was reported that 83% of the U.S. users were women. In Britain, however, 56% of the user were male and their age profile was different too, being about 10 years younger than in the U.S., where the age range was typically 35-44.

6. Tumblr

Alexa Traffic Rank: 37

Daily Pageviews: 131,419,411

Daily Unique Visitors: 8,947,400

Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website, owned and operated by Tumblr, Inc. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog, named a “tumblelog”. Users can follow other users’ blogs, as well as make their blogs private. Much of the website’s features are accessed from the “dashboard” interface, where the option to post content and posts of followed blogs appear. As of February 27, 2012, Tumblr had over 46.2 million blogs. According to comScore, it scored 13.4 million unique visitors in the U.S. in July 2011—up 218% from July 2010. Its headquarters is located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City.

5. Weibo

Alexa Traffic Rank: 25

Daily Pageviews: 806,160,989

Daily Unique Visitors: 10,968,650

Sina Weibo is a Chinese microblogging (weibo) website. Akin to a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, it is one of the most popular sites in China, in use by well over 30% of Internet users, with a similar market penetration that Twitter has established in the USA. It was launched by SINA Corporation on 14 August 2009, and has more than 300 million registered users as of February 2012.

4. LinkedIn

Alexa Traffic Rank: 12

Daily Pageviews: 429,662,772

Daily Unique Visitors: 21,344,400

LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of 9 February 2012, LinkedIn reports more than 150 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Czech and Polish. Quantcast reports LinkedIn has 21.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 47.6 million globally. In June 2011, LinkedIn had 33.9 million unique visitors, up 63 percent from a year earlier and surpassing MySpace. LinkedIn filed for an initial public offering in January 2011 and traded its first shares on May 19, 2011, under the NYSE symbol “LNKD”.

3. Twitter

Alexa Traffic Rank: 9

Daily Pageviews: 284,456,426

Daily Unique Visitors: 33,791,450

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 140 million active users as of 2012, generating over 340 millions tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It has been described as “the SMS of the Internet.” Unregistered users can read the tweets, while registered users can post tweets through the website interface, SMS, or a range of apps for mobile devices. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in New York City. The Twitter website is one of the top ten most visited on the Internet.

2. Google+

Alexa Traffic Rank: ?

Daily Pageviews: ?

Daily Unique Visitors: ?

In November 2011, Google+ was integrated into the account creation process for other Google services, such as Google Mail. According to independent analysis of its growth in December 2011, the site was adding an estimated number of 625,000 new users a day, which may total 400 million members by the end of 2012. The site’s popularity accelerated in December 2011, with almost a quarter of its total user base joining in December alone, said Paul B. Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, who tracks the numbers as the “unofficial statistician” for Google+.  However, on February 28, 2012 Todd Wasserman from Mashable reported Google+ users are only spending 3.3 minutes monthly on Google+ which is a downward trend from 4.8 minutes in December and 5.1 minutes in November compared to Facebook users currently spending 7.5 hours using Facebook monthly.

1. Facebook

Alexa Traffic Rank: 2

Daily Pageviews: 14,870,078,804

Daily Unique Visitors: 170,177,700

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc. As of April 2012, Facebook has more than 900 million active users. According to Social Media Today, in April 2010 an estimated 41.6% of the U.S. population had a Facebook account. Nevertheless, Facebook’s market growth started to stall in some regions, with the site losing 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011.