Nielsen: MySpace, Club Penguin growth static, LinkedIn soaring
Music-focused social networks Imeem and Buzznet are also growing fast, Nielsen finds, and Facebook continues to grow, but not as quickly as one might expect.
The April 2008 iteration of those numbers that Nielsen releases each month about social-networking site activity indicate that growth on News Corp.'s MySpace continues to slow, and that kiddie virtual world Club Penguin--acquired by Disney last year for $350 million--is just about static.
The Nielsen numbers, which track monthly unique visitors to social-networking sites, found that MySpace's growth from April 2007 to April 2008 was just 3 percent, and that Club Penguin's traffic shrank 7 percent. If Nielsen's numbers are accurate (which is always debatable with online metrics), that's not good for News Corp and Disney. In August, for example, the same methodology from Nielsen found that Club Penguin had grown 250 percent year-over-year and that MySpace was still growing at a healthy rate of 23 percent.
The numbers also reveal that business social network LinkedIn, which may or may not be aiming for a billion-dollar valuation, is still growing rapidly, pulling in 361 percent more unique users than it did a year ago. Facebook is growing more slowly, with 56 percent more visitors--and keep in mind that April 2007 was just a month before the company announced its developer platform and "exploded," at least in terms of Valley chit-chat.
Music-focused social-media sites Imeem and Buzznet are also notable, pulling in 92 percent and 104 percent growth respectively. Over the past year, both well-funded sites have been pursuing ambitious development strategies: Imeem has been inking licensing deals with both music and video content providers, and Buzznet has been acquiring blogs like Stereogum and the formerly Gawker Media-owned Idolator.