Developer Analytics published an illuminating article about metrics for social apps covering:

• Virality (”k-factor) as the new metric
• Moving the “Referral” stage forward
• Importance of seed groups for viral growth

Read the full article: Analytics for Social Networking Apps « developeranalytics [dA] | blog

The symptoms are obvious now, but the causes still remain unclear (users get bored, get concerned about privacy, get frustrated by complexity …):

The latest stats from Nielsen Online show a significant decline in month-over-month unique visitors to Facebook in the US. In April, traffic fell to 22.4M uniques, down from the 24.9M reported in March. Year-over-year traffic growth decelerated from 98% to a much more modest 56%. MySpace also saw a modest decline (from 60.3M to 58.7M), while LinkedIn continued its torrid growth from 7.8M uniques in March to 8.6M in April.

Read on: Bubble Alert: Facebook Traffic Declines 10% in April

O’Reilly Radar published a comparison of the MySpace vs. the Facebook application ecosystem:

Within a few months, Myspace has quietly built an application platform with over twelve hundred applications. I previously posted a graph for Facebook app categories, in which I compared the categories using the number of active users. Unlike the older Facebook platform, Myspace only provides the number of installs:

Read on: Myspace/Facebook App Platforms & Total Installs – O’Reilly Radar

eMarketer published the new numbers for the US online advertising market:

Via Online Advertisers To Spend Through Turbulence

An interesting statistics about the downtimes of popular social networks in January and February can be found on the official blog of Pingdom. Pingdom monitors the uptimes of company websites and is a start-up from Sweden. The winner of this ranking is Yahoo! 360 (just five minutes downtime). It’s loser is Bebo with a downtime of 12 hours and 28 minutes – in less than two months!

Hope your network stays up! Have a good time!

What a statement:

Half of all music sold in the US will be digital in 2011 and sales of digitally downloaded music will surpass physical CD sales in 2012, according to a Forrester Research report, “The End Of The Music Industry As We Know It.”

But the most interesting insight is shown here:

(picture taken from Marketing Charts)

“People buy, what they like” is the message here!

And:

Social networks. DRM-free music enables every profile page on MySpace.com or Facebook to immediately become a music store where friends sell friends their favorite tracks.

Remember this post from yesterday?

Have a good time!

Surprise, surprise! Yes, women and men are different! At least, when watching online videos. According to a Nielsen rating young women (18 – 34) prefer Network TV websites (22 %) over user-generated content (11 %). Men are the other way round: user-generated content (27 %) and Network TV websites (12 %).

Have a good time!

Via digital:next

Joining a social network is a bit like joining a circle of friends. It takes time to cultivate the contacts and so you don’t participate in two or three networks – offline or online – at a time. This insight is supported by a study on German social network users from a friend of mine. The results (in German) can be found here: in average German users are active in 2.21 social networks.

What is also interesting: people don’t use social networks mainly as a dating platform, but as a social utility to cultivate existing friendships.

So have a good time with your networks!

A 32 year old MySpace user said this about the ads on his favourite social network. He is not alone according to BusinessWeek and also MySpace is not the only social network whose growth is slowing and whose users are spending in average less time on their networks. The slowing in growth was to be expected, because there are already a lot of people who have an account at MySpace, Facebook & Co.

The decrease in user time and in click rates, however, is critical to the business model of most social networks, which is based mainly on advertising. The reasons for the decrease are:

• The laggards spend in average less time on social networks and so the overall average time decreases.
• The early adopter, which spend a lot of time with MySpace, Facebook & Co. are probably leaving as these networks become mainstream.
• The user are annoyed by the ads and so are moving to new sites, which don’t place ads on their pages, yet.
• The attention of the users stays the same, but the number of ads per user increases and so the average click decreases.

If the incomes from advertising decreases in the nearby future, companies will seek for alternatives, like Facebook, which sold in ten month 24 million virtual gifts (costs: 1 $ per gift). That’s why paid content is back.

Nevertheless, have a good time with your social network – online and offline.