The web-analytic site StatCounter compared the top 7 social media sites and came up with a very interesting result. The growth rate of StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site that finds the best pages for its users, is higher than that of Facebook. According to StatCounter’s measurement, in United States, StumbleUpon had surpassed Facebook’s 38 percent of all social media traffic by achieving 43 percent of it.
Before StatCouner, some other analytic firms conducted market measurement and most of their findings showed that Facebook’s growth rate in U.S started becoming flat from the month of October. Compete and comScore have shown the same thing. As far as, Quantcast is concerned, a slight change of tracking methodology and the number of unique visitors reduced to 129 million from 137 million. Google Ad Planner’s presentations are consistent to each other. Their DoubleClick measurement facility accounted for nearly 600 million unique visitors across the globe.
Interestingly, StatCounter’s last year’s result was significantly different. Facebook was credited for having 48% U.S social media users while StumbleUpon was having only 30%. After that however, the scenario has changed. The funny thing is, StumbleUpon’s user base doesn’t come into discussion if compared to that of Facebook. 13 million is in no way close to the nearly 600 million. But we have to keep in mind, StumbleUpon’s social networking acceptability lies in allowing web users discover and rate videos, webpages, photos on the basis of personalised choice. Since it is so, StumbleUpon is sure to generate a good number of traffic but not necessarily that traffic has to turn into a resource for its user base.
When global traffic is taken into account, Facebook still ranks number one with 60 percent of the marketshare. While StumbleUpon has only 20 percent.
When we look at the Indian traffic, Facebook is way over others with 80 percen of the marketshare, while YouTube is second at 7 percent and StumbleUpon is at 3 percent only.
Other than the seven top social media sites, StatCount also trackes three million other websites for 15 billion page views. The other five social media sites are Digg, Myspace, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit.