Social networking and the use of sites such as Facebook or Myspace has become a large part of communication. Facebook has 54 million active users, with 250,000 additional members registering daily [1]. These sites haven’t always enjoyed such popularity, however. The predecessors to these sites, specifically USENET in the 1970’s and the Bulletin Board Systems, or BBS, in the 1980’s floundered [2]. These sites, however, were somewhat primitive. The social networking sites that we enjoy currently have no doubt benefited from the numerous technological advances since the first social networking sites.
It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1990’s that networking sites began to become practical. The first site to become popular was classmates.com. Users of classmates.com enter the high school and/or college they attended and the site would show members of their graduating class. Members would spend large amounts of time looking up their high school friends and seeing what became of the people they graduated with. The owner of the site eventually took advantage of the addicting nature of the site and started charging a fee [2].
It might have been the fee, however, that was classmates.com’s undoing. The two most popular social networking sites, Facebook and Myspace, have no fee. It’s probably this reason why they grew much quicker and more popular than classmates.com. For example, Facebook, despite being formed in 2004, almost 10 years after classmates.com, ranks 7th amongst all internet traffic[5]. Classmates.com, on the other hand, comes in at 499th[4].It cannot help but be wondered: if Facebook and Myspace are free, and each has millions and millions of users, how can they afford to keep their sites running? The answer is obvious. With Facebook and Myspace 7th and 6th, respectively, in total traffic, advertisers are willing to pay decent amounts of money to have their products or services advertised[6].
Another attractive feature of these sites to advertisers is the fact that almost everybody uses them, regardless of race, age or any other defining characteristic. Don’t be mislead, however, into thinking that users are spread evenly over all of these groups. Studies made public in the Journal of Communication show that most users are young and are viewed as more popular than those who do not belong to these social networking sites[3].
As popular as these sites have become, they’ve still only been around for, on average, four years. Myspace and Facebook are drastically different than the sites that preceded them, so might new social networking sites even more powerful and popular than the current ones exist in four or five years time?
[1] Facebook. 15 Nov. 2007 <http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics>.
[2]Class notes.
[3]Ishii, Kenichi. (2006). Implications of mobility: the uses of personal communication media in everyday life. Journal of Communication, 56, 346-365.
[4]Alexa. 15 Nov. 2007 <http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=classmates.com>.
[5]Alexa. 15 Nov. 2007 <http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=facebook.com>.
[6]Alexa. 15 Nov. 2007 <http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=myspace.com>.
2 comments:
Your blog post on social networking sites is very interesting. I like how throughout the paper you followed a pattern of identifying whether sites charged fees or not and how it affected them and their success. I agree that the reason many didnt succeed is because they charged fees and that the reason sites like myspace and facebook are so popular because they are free of charge to the individual users. I love that advertisers have such a market with these websites because they basically pay for me to use myspace and facebook, along with providing money for the hosts to sustain the websites for everyone to use.
brown.2796
I have a facebook account and know that i would never have opened one if there was a fee. I thought it was interesting that research showed that younger and more popular individuals were more likely to have such accounts. I would have assumed that individuals who weren't as socially popular would spend more time on such sites since they do not get the same amount of social interaction offline.
williams.2541
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