Heather Hopkins’ post yesterday about the growth of Bebo in the UK prompted some questions on its growth in the US. The short answer: MySpace has such a huge piece of the social networking pie in the US that it would take some time for any of its growing legion of competitors to chip away at its dominance.
The long answer:

• Search terms relating to MySpace accounted for 5 of the top 10 highest volume search terms driving traffic to all sites for the four weeks ending April 29, 2006. The term ‘bebo’ ranked at number 405 in search volume.

• For the week ending April 29, 2006, the market share of visits to MySpace properties was 162 times greater than the share of visits to Bebo.

• -The market share of visits to Bebo increased by 33% when comparing April 2006 to February 2006, just two months ago. The share of visits to MySpace was up a respectable 20% in this period.

• The share of page views tells a slightly different story – page views for Bebo were up 100% from February to April, but page views for MySpace properties were up only 19%. This shows that Bebo is growing at a good clip, and users are doing more on the site.

• However, MySpace properties accounted for 14.1% of all Internet page views of the 500,000+ websites tracked by Hitwise in the month of April 2006. Bebo accounted for 0.033% of page views in April. MySpace is truly a giant site: the share MySpace page impressions was 48% greater than the share of page impressions for the top 10 Yahoo! properties in April.

Bebo is not MySpace’s closest competitor in the US – other sites like Xanga, Facebook, and Hi5 account for a significant share of category visits, as shown in the rankings table below. This demonstrates how different the US social networking landscape is from the UK and other countries. The web is truly global, and monitoring how your site and your competitors’ sites are being used around the world can dramatically influence the strategic direction of your online business.