Orkut - the undiscovered country, or is it?

Have you heard about how Orkut is dying?  How MySpace is king of the mountain and Facebook and Bebo are hot on the heels of No.1 MySpace?

With all these talk of MySpace and how Yahoo! buying Facebook will change everything and create a powerful MySpace competitor.  Bebo has millions in funding and a base in Europe and is taking America by storm.

Oh don’t forget SecondLife, at 1 million registered users you would think the talk would be rather moderate but nope everyone is going crazy over them, even the conservative practical Economist has discussed them.

Hearing this constant propaganda you will forgive me my curiosity in finding the truth of it for myself, so I did some research.  I used the following methods:

• Google’s trends to track keyword volume
• Search results from Google and Yahoo! using the term social networking and social networks
• Alexaholic to see the kind of value these websites are getting
• Technorati showing the number of instances these players had their name mentioned (who is the hot topic)
• Then I made some unacceptable assumptions (I am not a scientist so I probably made many assumptions) I just don’t know what they are because I am not a trained scientist

Please note all stats are either based on 6 months of information or since the start of 2006 (except Technorati which only provides data on the last 90 days).  Its hard to standardise as all the data providers have their own interface.

As you can see in the above Google Trend graph shows that by search terms MySpace is killing the competition in both pure search(top of above graph)and news references (bottom section of above graph).  Notice that Facebook picks up in the News reference category just as the data runs out in September, I think that’s when the rumour mill started to really pick up steam, maybe this could be good for Facebooks visibility as a brand.

The search doesn’t have an image as it would be too big and unwieldy to publish on this site so I will explain what I saw when I searched social networks (Google, Yahoo!) and social networking (Google, Yahoo!).

Social Networks

• Google (searching ranking in brackets) - Orkut (27th), Friendster (35th), then gave up after 10 pages into Google and having only found Orkut and the token Friendster.
• Yahoo!  (same as above) - None of the above including the token Friendster in the top 10 pages.

Maybe I picked the wrong term, but it does seem odd that more blog posts and news references came up rather than hugely traffiked sites like MySpace.

Social Networking

• Google (searching ranking in brackets) - MySpace (3rd), Friendster (4th), Orkut (9th), Facebook (63rd), you guessed it, I gave up at page 10.
• Yahoo!  (same as above) -  Orkut (8th), Friendster (16th), again gave up after 10 pages

Now for the most data of all came from Alexa’s data base in the form of a nice comparison chart generated via Alexaholic (Alexaholic mashes up Alexa data).

The above clearly shows that Myspace while ahead is only really being chased by Orkut as MySpace’s other competitors appear to incapable of generating growth.  In fairness I did use ‘reach’ not page views as my desired perspective.  Why?  Because I believe although the US market is the most important (today) more growth is being generated outside the US and that countries outside the US are better positioned today to influence the final outcomes of companies where as even 2 or 3 years ago anything that was huge in the US automatically could dominate elsewhere.  Orkut’s reach is a significant factor and I think more telling that page views.

UPDATE: I have added pageviews below for those wishing to view pageview data from alexaholic/alexa.

Technorati search results (any authority):

MySpace - 3,469,761
Facebook - 219,394
Bebo - 25,595
Secondlife - 5,607
Orkut - 25,605

So I started this post on Friday last week and I got delayed for personal reasons (aarrggh) and now I just did a search and saw a similar post by TechCrunch.  How disappointing is that?

Anyway if you are interested in reading TechCrunch’s post Orkut Bigger Than MySpace? Ok, Maybe Not go for it, but it mostly focuses on Orkut vs Myspace rather than a larger analysis like mine.  They do use a couple different sources though for their post which is always good.  Worth checking out for sure.

After all of this searching and analysis I am left wondering, what is the value of a Facebook purchase, does Orkut’s growth represent a broader reach globally or are their numbers being interpreted incorrectly relative to MySpace?  Is MySpace not cancelling accounts appropriately and therefore distorting their numbers so badly that Orkut is catching up and no one realised it until now?   How does a social network like Orkut get so much traffic and still remain such an unknown property?

So many questions so few answers.  What are you thoughts as I would really like to hear them?

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If you are interested in how Alex generates its Traffic information you can check out About Alexa Traffic Information.