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This morning, AOL’s Chariman and CEO Randy Falco said of his company's acquisition, “Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL’s personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media.” “Leading position” might be a bit of an overstatement, at least in the US, according to some statistics sent our way by Nielsen Online.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]In February, Bebo received 2.25 million unique visitors in the US, placing it between Buzznet and Imeem in the rankings, and representing less than 5% of the traffic that MySpace received during the same period. While it did represent 86% year-over-year growth, users spent significantly less time on the site – 81% less than they did in February of last year.
As for the rest of the trends in the space, I’ve highlighted some of the hot and the cold (in orange and blue, respectively) in the chart below. Last month’s reports of Facebook’s demise seem to be greatly exaggerated, as the site is sporting 102% year-over-year unique audience growth. Meanwhile, MySpace growth has gone flat, though users are spending 10% more time on the site – not inconsequential when you consider how huge their audience is. That number should continue to rise with today’s consumer launch of their application platform.
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