Global comparisons: Fastest Growing Online Properties

Continuing our series of excerpts from the Future of Media Report 2007, in this post we will cover the Fastest Growing Online Properties, which features some of the research done by Nielsen//NetRatings for the Report. The relevant data and commentary from the report is below – click on any of the images below to get the complete Report with full details.

One of the great things about having Nielsen//NetRatings as a research partner for the Report is that we were able to bring together global data in new ways to provide original research and insights. There are some very interesting perspectives that emerge from the differences in how new media properties are taken up across countries.

The US leads in usage of all leading social networks. The pace of growth in UK and Australia is extremely high, however they still signifi cantly lag the US in terms of breadth of usage. MySpace is the incumbent globally in terms of market presence. Facebook began as a US college-only social network, however since opening to other users has had strong international as well as domestic uptake. Opening up the Facebook platform to thirdparty developers in May 2007 has contributed to phenomenal global growth as consumers integrate increasingly more interactive tools.

YouTube has established itself as one of the most popular online sites globally, with very strong growth in the US to 30% of the online population accessing YouTube each month. The pace of growth in this type of US site in non-US markets has been so rapid that the total pages being consumed is starting to skew towards international rather than domestic content. The announcement in June of nine country-specifi c versions of YouTube will fragment some of this traffic. Wikipedia is consistently highly used across countries, while Apple’s UK website has greater market share than its US website, due to the relative lack of alternative music download sites.

Blogging platforms – with Blogger.com and SixApart.com the dominant players – show similar patterns in international usage to social networks, with strong growth in the UK and Australia as they catch up with the US lead in blogging.

http://www.downes.ca Stephen Downes

The four top English speaking nations are the U.S., Britain, Canada and Australia.
Canada has 33 million people, almost as large as Britain and much larger than Australia.
Is there any reason why Canada would be omitted from these comparisons?
http://rossdawsonblog.com Ross Dawson

Hi Stephen, I’d love to be more comprehensive in the data, but we have to cut off somewhere.. . Australia’s included because I’m primarily based here, and it is a more distinct market than Canada, which tends to have similar characteristics to the US market (a gross generalization I know…).
In both this and last year’s report we focused on a small set of country comparisons. There’s in fact no particular reason to focus on English-speaking nations, though beyond the US, the UK is also a highly distinctive market. The ones I’d really like to include beyond the core nations are Japan, China, India, South Africa, Brazil, and France or Germany. Hopefully we’ll be able to fit them in next year.
Anne

I am sceptical about the stats. Eg. “reach”, what does that mean? Registered users? A large proportion of the MySpace accounts are spam accounts. If the stats are not taken into consideration qualitative factors (eg., is it real persons), they dont really say much…
Jomamma

Youtube is gettin’ bigger, negro!