Guest Post: Top 10 Social Network and Blog Rankings: 3 Interesting Points

by Ann Handley

The Top 10 US Social Network and Blog Site Rankings were just issued for October, and there were a couple of interesting bits.

First, the highlights, via MarketingCharts:

• MySpace again wins the Smackdown of top US social networking sites, with more than 58.8 million unique visitors in October, according to custom lists of top US social networking sites and blogs compiled by Nielsen Online.
• MySpace visitors increased 19 percent year over year.
• Google’s Blogger remains number one in blog site rankings, with 34.1 million visitors, an increase of 58 percent from the year-earlier period.
• Facebook, ranked second among social networking sites, increased its number of visitors to 19.5 million, up 125 percent vs. Oct. ’06.
• LinkedIn is ranked 6th, growing 189 percent over last year, reaching 4.9 million visitors.
• My 10-year-old’s favorite social networking site, ClubPenguin, was ranked 9th, growing 157 percent from last October, to nearly 3.9 million penguins. Oops, visitors.

So here are three interesting data points:

The lead dogs are pulling ahead of the pack. the number of visitors to the top 2, MySpace and Facebook, increased from September, whereas those ranked 3rd through 4th (Classmates Online and Windows Live Spaces) decreased visitor numbers slightly from the previous month. (See the September rankings here.)

WordPress is kicking A… The little blog company that could, WordPress, has steamrolled up in the rankings to number two, having grown an incredible 444 percent (!) compared with the year-earlier period. It had 11.4 million visitors, up from 2.1 million last year. I’d love some insight on how WordPress has achieved such tremendous growth – anyone know the backstory?

…but so are blogging platforms in general. Six Apart/Type Pad might have dropped to No. 3, but it also grew a respectable 20 percent, to nearly 10.6 million visitors in October.

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Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs. She blogs at the MarketingProfs Daily Fix.