BUZZ NEWS

Good word-of-mouth for Word-of-Mouth in the USA

Posted on November 26, 2007
Cordula Werle

A few days ago, Nielsen Online has published a report on the top U.S. social networking sites and blogs in October 2007 in the areas “Home and Work”. The company measures and analyzes web audiences, advertising and commerce.

A recent Research Brief on the trust placed in word-of-mouth marketing shows that MySpace ranks highest on the list of social networking sites and blogs in the U.S., with 58.8 million unique visitors in October 2007, which means a growth of 19 percent compared to October 2006. Facebook comes second, with a growth of 125% compared to last October. Next among the top 5 are Classmates Online, Windows Live Spaces and AOL Hometown, followed by LinkedIn, AOL People Connection, Reunion, Club Penguin and Buzznet. LinkedIn and Club Penguin have expanded most during the last 12 months, with growth numbers of 189% and 157% respectively.

Among the top 10 blogs for October 2007, also in the area “Home and Work”, Blogger ranks top with 21.5 million unique visitors in October 2007, followed by WordPress, Six Apart TypePad, tmz and LiveJournal. Out of these, Wordpress has seen the highest growth with a record of 444% since October 2006. You can consult more data for the Top 10 US social networking sites and blogs here.

The continuing growth trend in the last 12 months alone proves that word-of-mouth definitely is a media of the future. It is underlined by the spending on word-of-mouth marketing, which according to PQMedia has jumped 35.9% in 2006 to $981.0 million and is expected to top $1 billion in 2007. Thus makes word-of-mouth one of the fastest growing alternative media segments.