Globally, the total minutes spent on social networks monthly saw a more than 100% gain over the same time last year, driving the average time per person spent on social networks to over six hours per month.

NOTE: Effective with June 2009 data reporting, Nielsen has made several enhancements to the U.S. NetView service.  For some sites, trending of previously-reported data with current results may show percentage differences attributable to this methodology change and should only be compared directionally.

Overall, the active unique audience to social networks grew nearly 30%, from 244.2M to 314.5M in the last year. In the U.S., the average active unique audience grew to 149.M from 115M in February 2009.

Across the 10 countries measured, Facebook drew the largest active unique audience globally and claimed nearly three times the sessions per user of MySpace, the next closest network. Facebook users also spent more time per session, logging nearly six hours per user across the globe.

The Pareto principle, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule, is the idea that roughly 80 percent of activity will be accounted for by 20 percent of the participants. Vilfredo Pareto’s initial observation at the start of the 20th century, that 80 percent of Italy’s land was owned by 20 percent of the population, has become a common rule of thumb in business, but does it hold up when tracking activity for the U.K.’s most popular social networks?

To see if it does, we equated activity with ‘time spent’ to reflect who is posting or consuming content. The U.K. audience to each site in January 2010 was divided into groups: ‘light’ visitors – those spending no more than five minutes on the site during the month; ‘medium’ visitors – those spending between five minutes and 60 minutes: ‘heavy’ visitors – those spending more than 60 minutes. It’s worth noting that equating activity to ‘pages viewed’ instead of ‘time spent’ produced similar results to the graphs below.

Grouping Twitter’s U.K. audience in this way reveals ‘light’ users account for 67 percent of the site’s audience and average less than 2 minutes on the site during the month. The ‘medium’ users account for 26 percent of the audience, averaging over 22 minutes. The ‘heavy’ users’ account for 7 percent of the audience but average almost 6 hours and 17 minutes.

Pareto would suggest that 20 percent of the visitors to a site would account for 80 percent of the total time spent on that site. However, for Twitter in the U.K., almost 80 percent of the time spent on the site is accounted for by the 7 percent of ‘heavy’ visitors. Conversely, 93 percent of the people who visit Twitter account for just 20 percent of the content posted and consumed.

Twitter’s activity metrics are not unusual when compared with other social networks. Three percent of MySpace’s visitors account for 63 percent of total time spent on the site; 14 percent of Bebo’s visitors account for 87 percent of total time. For LinkedIn, 5 percent of visitors account for half the total time. Half of Facebook’s U.K. audience (52 percent) account for almost all (98 percent) of the time spent on the site. This is because during the month of January, Facebook’s ‘heavy’ visitors averaged 14 hours 20 minutes, their ‘medium’ users (32 percent of the audience) averaged 30 minutes while their ‘light’ visitors (16 percent) averaged less than 2 minutes.

In Facebook’s case, where the average time per person is so high, defining a heavy user as someone who ‘only’ spends at least one hour on the site might downplay the significance of the remaining 48 percent of visitors. Whilst they account for just 2 percent of the time this 48 percent still represent over nine million minutes of activity on the site during the month. If we changed our parameters and defined a ‘heavy’ Facebook visitor as spending at least five hours on the site, it would show that 26 percent of Facebook’s visitors are ‘heavy’ and that they account for 88 percent of total time on the site.

In fact, when looking at a distribution graph of the U.K. Facebook audience segmented by how much time they spend, something very interesting happens. Normally, as the time segments increase, the percentage of the audience in each segment decreases (i.e. the majority of any site’s audience are people who don’t spend very long and very few people spend a large amount of time). However, for Facebook, we see the distribution graph follow the standard pattern until we get to the 9+ hours a month visitors, when the curve starts to go up relatively dramatically.

The 20+ hours per month visitors are the fourth biggest segment in Facebook (almost 10 percent of the site’s audience falls into this band.) Only the ‘less than 1 hour’ (48 percent) and ‘1-2 hours’ per month (12 percent) segments are larger.

The downside for publishers, not just social networks, in the “how popular I am” stakes, of course, is that a large part of its audience (the ‘light’ users) probably aren’t going to be of much value to advertisers. The flipside is they have an extremely hardcore group of engaged visitors who are extremely attractive to advertisers. This latter group are particularly ripe for a fundamentally new approach to the online display ad model in terms of both ad units and ad inventory that was proposed in our 2009 Global Faces and Networked Places Report. A successful ad model, particularly for smaller social networks, being one that is built on a deeper, richer two-way conversation between an advertiser and a consumer that adds value to the latter.

In the beginning there were ISPs, which then gave way to portals ― aggregators of content and links ― which then led to the rise of “search” as the dominant form of Internet navigation or, how we get to where we we’re going on the web. However, as with most forms of evolution, change is constant, and over the past two years search navigation has appeared to shift to social media.

We continue to see that social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation in a big way. But how? Is social media taking the place of portals and search as the hub of online navigation?

These questions led to some in-depth research – including an online panel survey of 1,800 participants fielded in August 2009 – in which we looked at three main consumer segments using search (Searchers), portals (Portalists) or social media (Socializers) as their primary vehicle for content discovery.

What We Found
In a nutshell, there is a segment of the online population that uses social media as a core navigation and information discovery tool — roughly 18 percent of users see it as core to finding new information. While still a smaller percentage than those who use search engines or portals like Yahoo! or MSN, it is a significant figure. And as social media usage continues to increase (unique visitors to Twitter.com increased 959% YOY in August) I can only expect this figure to grow.

The appeal of Social Media
At the root of the changing nature of content discovery is the sheer amount of information that is available on the Web. If you want to learn more about the latest smartphone released into the market, your favorite search engine is sure to provide you with hundreds, if not thousands, of articles about the device. But with the increasing number of resources available, it’s difficult to know what you should believe or take at face value. Socializers – those who spend 10 percent or more of their online time on social media – feel this effect more than others do. When asked, 26 percent feel that there is too much information available on the Internet, compared to 18 percent of people who predominantly use portals and just 5 percent of people who primarily use search engines.

But why does too much information lead one to use social media as a navigation tool? The short answer: Socializers trust what their friends have to say and social media acts as an information filtration tool. This is key because Socializers gravitate towards and believe what is shared with friends and family. If your friend creates or links to the content, then you are more likely to believe it and like it. And this thought plays out in the data.

We saw the power of opinions posted online in our global study earlier this year about trust in advertising, and the point came up again in our recent findings. Social media is becoming a core product research channel. Almost 15 percent of Socializers most trusted information they found on blogs when researching new purchases online, while nearly 20 percent trusted most the information they found on message boards.

So are social networks replacing portals or search engines? Perhaps. Regardless, if we don’t understand and address people feeling increasingly alienated by the amount of information on the Internet, and the need for a human guide, yes, your favorite social network (or something like it) will become the next great content gateway.

For more, join me for our webinar The Evolution of Content Discovery on Tuesday, October 6 (2PM ET)

In the past, we discussed ways that social media has transformed the internet, having been so bold to say that social networks fundamentally changed the way we consume online media. So, if social media and social networks are these all-powerful game changers, shouldn’t they eventually make a newsworthy impact on email, the internet’s original “killer app?”

We decided to churn some quick data to test our hypothesis that “Consumption of social media decreases email use.” First, we broke the online population into four groups. The first three are terciles of social media consumption in minutes. The fourth is a group that doesn’t use social media at all. We then looked at each segment’s time of web based email consumption over the course of a year. Finally, we subtracted the email consumption of those that do not use social media from those that do, basically to show a lift over possible external forces. Clearly, there are more robust approaches that could be taken (controlling for factors other than consumption for example) but for the sake of this simple experiment, we tried to keep it straightforward.

Here’s what we found:

At least from this small experiment our hypothesis was disproved, but interesting nonetheless.  It actually appears that social media use makes people consume email more, not less, as we had originally assumed – particularly for the highest social media users. Intuitively this makes some sense.  Social media sites like Facebook send messages to your inbox every time someone comments on your posting or something you’ve participated in, and depending on your settings, can send updates on almost every activity.  Also, it’s perfectly logical that as people make connections though social media, they maintain those connections outside of the specific platform and may extend those connections to email, a phone conversation or even in-person meetings.

This modest kitchen sink experiment further stoked our curiosity; the next step is to take a more robust approach to develop correlations between platforms to understand if this relationship is different across specific demographics and behavioral groups – rather than by levels of consumption.

If you have other theories or questions, we’d love to see your comments or questions below. Of course, you can contact us by email or social media.

“Nielsen’s online data shows that about half of the U.S. population visited a social networking website in the last year and that number grows every quarter,” said Wils Corrigan, AVP, Research & Development, Nielsen Claritas. “The rising popularity of these sites and the deep engagement consumers have with them has advertisers and marketers asking for more and more detail as to which lifestyles should be targeted for their online advertising and promotions.”

Facebook vs Myspace

Through Claritas, Nielsen defines U.S. households in terms of 66 demographically and behaviorally distinct segments like “Young Digerati” or “Beltway Boomers.” When those segments are overlaid with the activity of Nielsen’s online panel of more than 200K, we see a marked difference in the demographic makeup of the two largest social networks, Facebook and MySpace.

• Facebook users have a largely upscale profile. The top third of lifestyle segments relative to affluence were 25% more likely to use Facebook than those in the lower third.
• The bottom third segments related to affluence are 37% more likely to use MySpace than those in the top third.
• Users of Facebook were also much more likely to use LinkedIn, a network geared towards business and professional networking, than those who use MySpace.

Bloggers more urban as well

According to Nielsen Claritas, the blogging and tweeting community at large isn’t necessarily more affluent, but bloggers and tweeters do live in more urban areas such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. The penetration rates of the top two most visited blogging platforms (Blogger, Wordpress) and the most popular micro-blogging platform (Twitter) show that Nielsen’s 12 Urban lifestyle segments are more likely to blog and tweet than Nielsen’s 22 Town & Rural segments.

Not surprisingly those lifestyle segments most likely to blog and tweet also tend to use Facebook and LinkedIn more often than those segments that typically don’t blog or tweet. Case in point, the Urban lifestyle segments for Blogger are 18% more likely to be Facebook users and 140% more likely to be LinkedIn users than the below average segments.

About the methodology

Nielsen examined the seven most-visited social networking websites and platforms: Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, ClassmatesOnline, and LinkedIn. Website penetration by segment was calculated by dividing the number of unique visitors to the website per segment by the total number of households in each segment.

“This growth suggests a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used,” said Jon Gibs, vice president, media and agency insights, Nielsen’s online division. “While video and text content remain central to the Web experience – the desire of online consumers to connect, communicate and share is increasingly driving the medium’s growth.”

Among those taking note of this trend: advertisers.  Estimated online advertising spending on the top social network and blogging sites increased 119 percent, from approximately $49 million in August 2008 to approximately $108 million in August 2009 – all despite a recession. Share of estimated spend on these sites has doubled, from 7 percent of online ad spend in 2008 to 15 percent in 2009.

Year-over-Year Percent Change in Online Ad Spend by Industry (U.S., August 2009)

*Estimated spend on social networking sites is based off of data for the top ad-supported member community sites ranked by unique visitors in August 2009
Read the full press release.

When comparing unique visitors of the music.myspace.com subdomain to other sites within the music category in June, it ranked third behind AOL Music and Yahoo! Music and ahead of popular music sites like MTV Networks Music and Pandora.com.

People between the ages of 12 and 17 were 2.4 time more likely than the average active Internet user to visit music.myspace.com. Visitors between 18 and 24 were 2.2 more likely than the average Internet user to visit the site in June.

On the video streaming front, with 120.1 million total streams, Myspace.com was the No. 1 social media site when ranked by streams for June 2009. It was also the No. 1 social networking site when ranked by unique viewers of video content, with 12.9 million viewers for the month. Facebook was the fastest growing social media site by both total video streams and unique viewers of video. Total streams increased 434 percent year-over-year, from 10.1 million streams to 54 million streams. Unique viewers of video increased 397 percent, from 2.4 million in June 2008 to 12 million in June 2009.

Twitter’s Big Move

Among the top 10 social media sites, Twitter.com was again the fastest growing, increasing 1,928 percent year-over-year, from 1 million unique visitors in June 2008 to 21 million unique visitors in June 2009–making Twitter the fourth most visited member communities site in June. Facebook continued to lead as the No. 1 U.S. social networking site for the sixth month in a row, with 87.3 million unique visitors in June 2009.

Facebook No. 1 For Time Spent

Facebook was also the No. 1 social networking site among the top 10 when ranked by average time per person, with visitors spending an average of 4 hours and 33 minutes on the site in June. This is a 240 percent year-over-year increase. The average time per person on Twitter increased 522 percent year-over-year, from 5 minutes and 2 seconds in June 2008 to 31 minutes and 17 seconds in June 2009, making it the fastest growing by time per person among the top 10.

*Note: Effective with June 2009 data reporting, Nielsen has made several enhancements to the NetView and VideoCensus services, including a panel that is 8 times larger, more granular reporting and improved accuracy and representativeness. These enhancements provide the highest quality data to our clients and the marketplace. For some sites, trending of previously-reported data with current results may show percentage differences attributable to these product enhancements and should only be compared directionally.

Looking at our newly expanded panel that includes more than 30,000 sites, we have found that short tail sites (those with a greater than 1 percent reach) remain the most engaging brands online.

It seems that the differentiation between the long tail and short tail is important. Long tail sites tend to have lower engagement levels than short tail sites.

However, it would be reasonable to ask: “well, since not all short tail sites are the same, what happens to those numbers if you remove portals and large social networks?” The answer is interesting. When we look at the data in relation to the highest traffic sites on the Web (e.g., Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, Apple and Facebook) here’s what happens:

Long tail sites tend to have lower engagement levels than short tail sites; however, the largest jump isn’t between long tail and short tail, it is really between everyone and the top 10 sites.

What does this amount to? As much as anyone thinks the future is in the long tail, it’s just not the case-at least not yet. In fact, consumers feel more comfortable on large, mass media sites. We know the Internet is changing. We know there are more blogs, boards, tweets and social networks than ever before. But what’s also clear is that while the Internet itself is fragmenting (like all other media), people continue to spend their time on the sites that offer them the most options and functionality.