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Datamonitor predicts that social networking sites will level off around the world in the year 2012. They also predict that the plateau will hit even sooner in the US. In the meantime, global active memberships in social networking sites are growing.

They’re expected to reach 230 million at the end of 2007 (this includes multiple memberships by one person).The money is good and growing.

For example, my friend’s Facebook App that took two weeks to build recently sold for $25k. And marketers who are savvy are getting a lot of press for their social networking presence. There is a lot of money and creativity being exchanged. “Revenues from social-networking services should reach $965 million, growing to $2.4 billion by 2012, writes MarketingCharts.”

In Datamonitor’s report called, The Future of Social Networking: understanding market strategic and technological developments they say that the most participation this year is happening in Asia Pacific, then Europe, the Middle East and Africa. North America is third on the list.

MySpace dominates in the US by a long shot. According to this data MySpace has over half of the social media memberships in the United States, followed by:

• Facebook: 18.2 percent


• Google’s YouTube and Orkut: a combined 7.6 percent


• Flickr 7.1 percent

Remember the data is in terms of memberships not traffic. Still, it’s surprising to see just how far behind Facebook is in this measurement.

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