The Growth of Cyber Communities


"Nielsen's online data shows that about half of the US population visited a social networking website in the last year and that number grows every quarter,"
-Nielsen Claritas research executive Wils Corrigan.

This was a quote I found through an Associated Free Press article hosted by Google. I have been searching daily for statistics on the growth rates and I started with Nielsen Research. My initial research led me to an article in the Washington Post first published in 2006. The article uses data from a research firm called ComScore Media Metrix, a research firm created in 1999 to measure trends in ecommerce. The most startling statistic I found was an insane growth rate in the number of users visiting Blogger.com after they were purchased by Google in a strategic business move. Amazingly one year after the purchase by the internet giant Google the amount of viewers to Blogger.com raised to over 15 million people from over 2 million the year before.

That is a growth rate of %650!


A final analysis of my research and a final search for updated information let me to the quote posted above on Friday September 23rd 2009. If half of the people in the US visited a social networking website that means over 150 million people in the US alone will visit sites like Blogger.com, not to mention the powerhouses like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. This makes me wonder how many people would be added to that number if they were to account for the entire world wide community, since we are looking at the growth rates of cyber communities on the world wide web.

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