by Josh Catone

According to new data from Inside Facebook, users over the age of 55 haven’t been as actively using Facebook over the past two months after triple digit growth in that demographic earlier this year. The report has resulted in speculation that while older people are trying Facebook, they’re not sticking around.

Between November 2008 and February 2009, the baby boomer set (age 55-65) was one of the fastest growing segments on the social network, up 175.3% for females and 137.8% for males, according to the statistics. But that user boom was short-lived, and those users aren’t returning in the same numbers.

In April and May there were actually 650,000 less users over the age of 55 on Facebook than the previous two months — the only age demographic where the site experienced a decrease in users over that period. Facebook grew by over 4% each month over the past two months, according to the blog’s measurements, which are based on data from Facebook’s advertiser tools, but its inability to hold the attention of its older users is interesting.

I don’t want to generalize, but the problem might be — at least partially — a case of needing to better educate new users. My mother told me in March that she had joined Facebook. When I asked a couple of weeks ago why she still hadn’t sent me a friend request, she admitted that she just didn’t know how. In fact, she has barely used her Facebook account at all, and only joined to try to reconnect with a few high school friends.

The reasons for using Facebook are different for older users than they are for younger age groups. Young people use Facebook as a means of daily communication, while many older users (in my anecdotal experience) seem to use Facebook as a replacement for email to keep in touch with family and old friends. For that reason, use of the site for people over 55 might be more reactive; that is, those users won’t log in every day, but only when they receive an alert informing them of something new to look at. Perhaps that means we’ll see a spike in usage among older users around holidays and other times when family and friends are likely to reach out and send messages or photos.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hidesy

There are a lot of reasons that social networks experience a bump in traffic during the holidays. For one, lots of people are off from work or school. Moreover, there simply isn’t that much else going on – a slowdown in email and news means more time to loiter around your favorite online hangouts.

This year has been no exception, as Hitwise breaks down the numbers. According to the analytics firm, Facebook saw record traffic this Christmas, with 1 in every 22 websites visited in the UK going to the social network. Overall, that made the site the second most popular online destination in the UK during the holiday, behind only Google.

Not surprisingly, watching videos also seems to have a strong correlation with having nothing better to do. YouTube was the 3rd most popular site in the UK for Christmas week, beating out Windows Live Hotmail. In all, Hitwise says that social networks accounted for 10% of web traffic during the period.

Thus, expect to see a big jump in growth when the numbers for top social networking sites are released next month. We’ll also likely see the ever-narrowing gap between Facebook and MySpace close even further in the US, as Facebook’s college-heavy audience enjoys more leisure time in front of their computers.

Meanwhile, if you’re lucky enough to still be on holiday, perhaps step away from the Web for a moment. Or, don’t

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, liliboas

By John Timmer | Published: December 28, 2008 – 09:10PM CT

People who have followed the development of the Internet are probably well aware of the Pew Charitable Trust, which has tracked the growth of the web through its Internet & American Life Project. But a separate arm of the Pew, the Research Center for the People & the Press has uncovered some data relevant to the online world when surveying the US population about the sources of its news. According to the group’s latest survey, performed in early December, the use of Internet news sources has passed that of newspapers for the first time.

The survey was performed from December 3rd through 7th, and it involved 1,489 adult participants. Most of the questions involved perceptions of the major news stories of the year, but several focused on the participants’ source of news. Here, Internet news sources had very significant gains, with 40 percent of the population saying it’s where they get “most” of their national and international news. That’s a significant leap from September of 2007, when only 24 percent had called it the source of most of their news.

The use of newspapers as a source has held steady in the mid-30s for the last several years, and came in at 35 percent of the survey population this time around. This steady performance, combined with the significant rise in the use of Internet, has meant that this is the first time since data collection started in 2001 that the newspapers have been pushed out of their second-place slot. Because of the wording of the survey, users could name more than one source for “most” of their news (which is why I keep putting it in quotes); this allowed TV to hold on to its first-place slot, being the choice of 70 percent of respondents. That’s actually the lowest result ever, and the first time it’s dropped noticeably since 2004, when it was at 74 percent.

These results may have been driven by a major shift in the 19-29 year old age group. In the last year, their news jones has been less satisfied by TV, dropping from 68 percent to 59 percent. The same fraction (59 percent) looked to the Internet for information, a huge rise from the September 2007 survey, when the figure was 34 percent. At the same time, the use of newspapers was up slightly in this population. The Pew report doesn’t indicate what percentage of the total survey population fell into this age group, but the usage patterns for the past several years show a fair bit of variability; it’s not clear whether an of the changes beyond the rise in Internet use should be viewed as significant.

It would be easy at this point to engage in a bit of Internet triumphalism, and there is some justification for this. It’s easier to find specialized news content online, and many papers have responded to declining ad revenues by cutting back on this. In terms of one of my own interests, the death of science content in traditional media (as exemplified by CNN, which recently axed its entire science staff) has definitely left me less interested in getting my news from TV.

Nevertheless, some are arguing that the decline of print is nothing to be celebrated. Although the many eyes of the Internet community can identify stories that might otherwise slip under the radar, few websites have the resources to do the depth of investigation that can be carried out by an experienced news staff. Internet content may have the advantage of being free, but that low price may come at a cost.

Facebook long ago passed MySpace in global visitors and time spent on the site, but now it appears to be gaining ground on Google.

A couple days ago, Facebook released some new statistics on user growth and engagement on the site. It now has more than 140 million active users, 70 percent of whom are outside the U.S. The number of active users added each month seems to be accelerating, only half are in college, and the fastest-growing demographic is 25 years and older.

There are now 52,000 apps on Facebook, created by 660,000 developers. That’s a serious platform. Some of the user engagement stats were also particularly interesting:

User Engagement

* Average user has 100 friends on the site
* 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
* More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day

Applications

* More than 700 million photos uploaded to the site each month
* More than 4 million videos uploaded each month
* More than 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month

How does this level of engagement compare to other large sites? These are global numbers so let’s start there, with minutes spent on the site, which is the way comScore measures engagement. According to the most recent global data from comScore, which is for October, people spent 33.9 billion minutes on Facebook (up 19 percent from September), compared to 41.6 billion minutes on Google (up 3.6 percent) and 18.5 billion on MySpace (down 2.5 percent). Yahoo is still heads and shoulders above everybody else with 120 billion minutes. And in terms of actual visitors, Google still has nearly four times as many monthly visitors worldwide as Facebook.

In the U.S., the gap between Facebook and Google in terms of time spent is much closer. ComScore has November data for the U.S., and it estimates people spent 8 billion minutes on Facebook during that month, versus 8.5 billion minutes for Google. MySpace was about double with 16.4 billion (it also had more visitors than Facebook in the U.S., with 75.5 million vs. 50.5 million).

Some might argue that it makes no sense to measure engagement for Google, since it’s stated goal has always been to send people away from its site as fast as possible. But that’s only for search, and even there Google wants to send you away only to draw you back. With its apps and other sites (Gmail, Google Docs, Youtube, Orkut, Google Docs), engagement is most definitely the name of the game, so it is a fair comparison.

By Ed Lee

On Monday, technology analyst house Forrester released a report that demonstrated consumer adoption of RSS had reached 11 per cent (versus almost 50 per cent of interactive marketers) and wonders:

“What’s holding RSS back?” (available to you for just $279.00)

The report, as blogged by Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion, included the following chart:

So, with just 3 per cent of the 1,900 U.S. adults who frequently go online and who don’t currently use RSS, “very interested” in using RSS in the future, is RSS as a technology reaching it’s zenith? Is it destined for use by a committed, yet niche audience?

No.

RSS use is only just getting started

RSS may not be used actively by consumers but the people who are design Web sites and online applications sure are using RSS. Look at the 110 million people on Facebook who use RSS via the “news feed” option.

read more…

Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., according to the latest search engine numbers from comScore. Its monthly qSearch report, which was released on Thursday night, breaks out the number of searches conducted on YouTube. If it were a standalone site, YouTube would be the second largest search engine after Google. More searches are done through YouTube than through Yahoo, which has been the case for the past few months.

Christa Quarles, an analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners, writes in a report:

YouTube continues to be a standout contributor for Google generating 2.73bn searches in the U.S., up 8.5% from 2.52bn last month and up 114% from 1.28bn in November 2007. YouTube currently represents 25.4% of U.S. Google site searches compared with 17.4% in November 2007 and is larger than all of Yahoo based on total U.S. queries in November.

The comScore numbers show healthy growth in core search activity as well (stripping out video search, map search, etc), especially for Google. Plain-vanilla search for Google grew 32.3 percent annually, compared to a 29.6 percent growth rate in October. Perhaps all of that holiday bargain hunting is helping.

Google’s core search market share (which does not include YouTube) edged up 0.4 percent from October to 63.5 percent (and up 5.9 percent year-over-year).

Yahoo’s market share of core search queries was 20.4 percent (down 0.1 percent from October, and down 2 percent year-over-year) and Microsoft’s was 8.3 percent (down 0.2 percent month-over-month, and down 1.5 percent year-over-year). See the tables below.

If you thought Randall Stross’ attack on Tesla yesterday was in poor taste, wait until you read what Michael Wolff has to say about MySpace. In a dinner interview with BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine, Wolff says:

…if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.

That’s just part of a much longer interview in which Wolff goes into detail on exactly why he thinks MySpace will go the way of AOL. He also makes some blatantly incorrect statements, such as “All of the growth now in MySpace is international,” which is incorrect. In the last year MySpace has grown about 10% in the U.S., adding 7.5 million monthly unique users to a total of 76.4 million. Non-U.S. users have grown from 45 million to 54 million, a 17% increase. (source: Comscore)

And those comments about MySpace users being poor and uneducated aren’t entirely correct either. Of MySpace’s U.S. users, 52% make more than $60,000 per year, which is far from poor. 23% make more than $100,000 per year. Just 11.6% make less than $25k/year.

Facebook’s numbers are 65% and 33%, respectively, which is more impressive. But MySpace has 30 million more U.S. users than Facebook (76 million v. 46 million), so MySpace’s aggregate numbers are higher. 17.6 million U.S. MySpace users make more than $100,000 per year.

Also true of MySpace users, according to Nielsen: 63% own homes, 86% are registered voters and 28% are college graduates. Facebook has similar numbers.

And a whole lot of people smart enough to work a Blackberry device seem to like MySpace, too.

See the graph below for more details.

By ALEX MINDLIN
Published: November 30, 2008

Canadian Internet users are far more likely than Americans to use a social networking Web site, according to September figures released by the research firm comScore. That number is consistent with Canadians’ generally heavy use of sophisticated Internet features like online video. “We joke that it’s because of those long winter nights up there,” said Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at comScore.

But it also reflects the broader truth that the popularity of such Web sites, and which services are at the top, can vary sharply in neighboring countries.

“One site may catch on in a certain country, and another may catch on elsewhere,” said Mr. Lipsman. “Often it’s whichever one gained prominence in the early phase of the game.”

For example, Google’s Orkut service, which has a third of Facebook’s traffic in the United States, is the dominant social networking site in both India and Brazil. ALEX MINDLIN

*Includes countries with a total Internet population of at least 10 million unique visitors in September 2008.

**Excludes traffic from public computers, such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones/PDAs.

“For Internet users in Brazil, social networking continues to flourish as a hugely popular activity,” said Alex Banks, managing director of Latin America for comScore. “One likely reason for social networking’s success in Brazil is that its concept of online community closely aligns with the culture in Brazil, which is also centered on a strong sense of community and social activity.”

Numbers Via Comscore

by Josh Bernoff

Forrester’s Social Technographics surveys show that when
it comes to social content 21% of online US consumers are Creators, 37% are
Critics (those who react to content created by others), and 69% are Spectators.

The 90-9-1 principle, recently publicized by Community
Guy Jake McKee at 90-9-1.com, says that in a community, the rule of thumb is
that 90% of visitors only view the content, 9% only comment or react to it, and
1% create it.

 This confuses people, and I often get questions about
who’s right. In fact, there is no contradiction between these two statements.
Let’s examine why.

First of all, the 90-9-1 principle applies to a single
site or community. Let’s suppose we are talking about tivocommunity.com,
for
example. 90-9-1 says that 1% of its members create content. But our
surveys
might detect a TiVo community member who just reads the Tivo posts, but
who is an enthusiastic Barack Obama supporter at myBO.com. Forrester’s
surveys would call her a Creator. But with regard to tivocommunity.com,
Jake’s rule says she’s in the 90% or lurkers. No contradiction, it just
depends on whether you’re looking at a single site or across all sites.
Since Creators (in the Forrester sense) include people who create
content at any site, they add up to a lot more than 1%

Second, our groups are designed to overlap.
Since we
also identify Collectors (who organize content) and Joiners (who join
social
networks), there’s no strict hierarchy. Some Joiners are Creators, some
Creators are Joiners, but neither group is a subset of the other. (When
creating Social Technographics I attempted to create a hierarchy of
behaviors, but carefully examining the data convinced me that was a
mistake.) So we allow our
categories to overlap. 90-9-1, which examines fewer activities, can
accommodate mutually exclusive categories.

Third, 90-9-1 is a rule of thumb. For example, according to 90-9-1.com,
only 0.16% of YouTube visitors upload content, far less than 1%. A community of Webmasters
will have a lot more contributors than a community of senior citizens. Our
surveys are actual data independent of site-to-site variation. (So I don’t get
to create a nice neat rule, while Jake can.)

What’s it mean? It means that 90-9-1 is a good rule of
thumb for sites, while Social Technographics is a good way to look at
populations. And it also means that you should check the Social Technographics
Profile of your customers first, to see how many of them are likely to
contribute if you put them in a community.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers just released their quarterly report on U.S. online advertising revenues. For the quarter, they estimate online advertising revenues were almost $5.9 billion ($5.865 billion, to be exact), which is an 11 percent increase from the same quarter a year ago and a 2 percent increase from the second quarter of 2008.