YouTube, Hulu and Google
In March, YouTube reached 100 million monthly viewers in the US. 6.3 billion videos were viewed on the site. Its competitor, Hulu, is also growing fast, but not nearly as fast as YouTube. In March alone, YouTube has grown almost two Hulus in size. According to some calculations, YouTube will serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009.
Facebook & MySpace
Facebook has grown from 100 million to 200 million users in less than 8 months. If it were a country, it would be bigger than Brazil. Its traffic has grown immensely in one year's period, especially in Europe where it grew 314%. According to comScore, it has grown a staggering 2,721% in Italy from February 2008 to February 2009. In other European countries, its growth was also immense: 999% in Spain, 607% in Belgium, 518% in France, 499% in Switzerland.
MySpace, the social network that used to break records like these, is now lagging behind Facebook; according to latest calculations, Facebook now has a total of 65.7 million unique visitors versus MySpace's 54.1 million. MySpace was sold to News Corp. for $580 million in 2005. Facebook's valuation? Depending who you believe, it could be anywhere from 2 to 15 billion dollars. Not bad, considering the economic situation.
Finally, here's another sign of the times: Nielsen Online's latest research shows that social networking is now more popular than email. According to their study, 66.8% of Internet users have used social networks, while only 65.1% have used email.
Twitter & the rest
Twitter itself is growing at a crazy rate; although it already has a very large audience, it grew 76.8 percent just from February to March. Its yearly growth rate? 1,382 percent. According to Nielsen, Twitter currently has 7 million unique monthly visitors. If it keeps growing at this rate, it'll have nearly 100 million visitors same time next year.
As far as social news sites go, Digg's recently launched DiggBar has increased the site's traffic by 20%, or so they claim. And, according to Compete, Digg is at 36 million uniques and growing fast again, despite a dip in traffic in February. Frequently cited as Digg's main competitors, Reddit and StumbleUpon are also growing, but they have a long way to go before they come anywhere close to Digg. Not everyone is doing this well, though. Another social news site, Propeller.com, is unfortunately dying, having fallen to around 1 million monthly uniques, compared to 1.89 million in September 2008.
Finally, the most recent numbers I've had the misfortune to write about: The Pirate Bay four has been sentenced to 1 year of prison each, and they must pay 3.6 million dollars in damages.