The folks at LiveSide have a blog post entitled Windows Live Spaces at a crossroads: will the US catch up to the world? which contains some interesting charts from ComScore. Specifically they call out the difference in the worldwide reach of various social networking services versus the North American reach. The relevant excerpt from the post is

As expected, MySpace is in a runaway lead, Facebook is coming on strong, Blogger is hanging in there, and Spaces pretty much brings up the rear.  If you read the blogs and follow Techmeme, TechCrunch, and Scoble, these numbers aren't anything surprising.

But take a look at the Worldwide numbers, and a somewhat different story emerges.

Social Networking Sites - Worldwide: Unique visitors per month (000)

Worldwide

While Facebook is growing steadily worldwide, here the numbers tell a far different story.  Windows Live Spaces is battling it out with Blogger and MySpace for the top spot.  Just for reference, we can see that the Worldwide usage of Social Networking sites is growing steadily:

You might quibble with the title of this blog post but it is hard to argue that Blogger is a social networking site by any definition of the term. When it comes to reach, no social networking site impacts as many users as Windows Live Spaces.

Of course, unique users aren’t the only metric Web sites are judged against and I’m sure there are many out there who will be quick to point out other charts that show our user engagement is lower than average which is a fair point. Personally, I suspect that the inclusion of the improved What’s New page will increase user engagement in a measurable way. It might just be me but I find myself visiting my What’s New page several times a day, in fact more often than I visit my Facebook news feed.

According to Facebook, the addition of the News Feed increased their page views by 70% in the first few months. I wonder if we’ll see a similar jump in the ComScore charts for Windows Live Spaces in a few months or whether FB’s results were an abberration. Only time will tell.

Now playing: Raekwon - Guillotine (Swordz) (feat. Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck & GZA/Genius)


 

Thursday, October 25, 2007 6:45:23 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Dare you suck.
Rip
Thursday, October 25, 2007 7:12:02 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
http://rickmccharles.com/?p=2546

...

It got me to go check out Windows Live Spaces (another terrible name, by the way, Microsoft). Turned out I have an account.

I even have 24 "friend invites", all SPAM.

So, because I have a Microsoft Hotmail account, I have a WLS page.

You can call me "low engagement member", alright.








Thursday, October 25, 2007 7:37:55 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Rick McCharles,
I believe ComScore only counts/estimates people who visit the various sites they measure not people who have dormant or unused accounts.
Thursday, October 25, 2007 8:30:04 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
so all hotmail users are WLS members.

Sounds kind of like Microsoft Live search aka "No.3 in search because we're the default search in IE"

Quite an embarrassing post Dare.
John Richards
Saturday, October 27, 2007 6:13:38 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Yeah, this is one of the main reasons I've stuck it out with Spaces, where I have my personal blog (4lightside), because of the broad international reach.

It's been pretty frustrating, though, to see Microsoft repeatedly break Spaces as they supposedly "improve" it and convert to Live, whatever that is (even they admit they don't really know).

Some of this is because they'd like to assume everyone is, or SHOULD, be using Internet Explorer, but this just shows how they still don't really get the internet.

MS is supposedly moving fast now with major announcements coming soon, so I'll hang in there a little longer. Spaces could be a great site, but despite its reach, as best I can tell traffic seems significantly down this year.
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