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How Bebo stacks up ... according to everyone else

It's always interesting to see what online audience and traffic measurements have to say about overal web use; traffic, number of users, website loyalty, etc. Now that Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) AOL is acquiring the UK-based social networking site Bebo.com for some $850 million, the site measurement companies are showing their own data. Notice that every one generates a different result.

When you look below, you'll see that all web measurement tools and methods generate different results.
The comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR) Data on Bebo.com is below, as of January, 2008:
  • Bebo had 22.4 million unique visitors worldwide with visitors averaging more than 3 hours and 30 minutes on the site during the month.
  • Bebo had 4.8 million unique U.S. visitors with visitors averaging 1 hour and 40 minutes on the site during the month.
  • 60% of Bebo's traffic came from Europe, followed by North America with 22%, and Asia-Pacific with 16%.
  • There were 11.4 million unique visitors from the United Kingdom to Bebo, representing the largest proportion of the site's worldwide traffic.
Data from Hitwise on Bebo.com is below, but this one is as of February, 2008:
  • Bebo ranked 4th among a custom category of 55 social networks, after MySpace, Facebook and MyYearbook receiving 1.15% of all U.S. visits to the category.
  • MySpace's share of U.S. Internet visits was 67 times larger compared with Bebo and Facebook's share of US Internet visits (among all categories) was 11x that of Bebo.
  • Bebo's share of U.S. Internet visits is down year on year. Share of U.S. Internet visits (among All Categories) to Bebo were down 23% last week and down 22%.
  • The average time spent on Bebo, was 30 minutes and 26 seconds, more than both MySpace (30m7s) and Facebook (21m0s). The average time spent on the site is flat year-over-year, MySpace is slightly down and Facebook is up 69%.
  • 22.15% of U.S visits to Bebo last week came from MySpace last week.
  • Of 'www.bebo.com's total upstream traffic, 17.37% consisted of new visitors and 82.63% consisted of returning visitors.
  • In the UK, Bebo is the most searched-for brand (ahead of eBay and Facebook) and has enormous brand equity.
Quantcast also makes different measurements as it measures more than 20 million US websites. Here is how it ranks Bebo.com:
  • US reach of 1,862,079 and an overall rank of #979...compared to a rank for AOL with a US reach of 56,302,232 and rank of #3, and a compared to a rank for Bloggingstocks.com with a US reach of 413,452 and overall rank of 5,552.
Alexa, owned by Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) has its own set of numbers. For whatever difference it makes, Alexa has perhaps one of the less clear ranking systems of smaller website operators as it measures users who use the Alexa Toolbar rather than all web users.
  • Bebo is listed as having a total traffic rank of #115.
  • Its UK rank is #10 and #161 in the U.S.
  • 39.7% of Bebo users come from the U.K. and 11.2% of users come from the U.S.
It's always amazing that the samplings for data differ so much from source to source. That is why many webmasters and those who evaluate traffic use more than one form of measurement. At the end of the day, that measurement may boil down to the good old price and earnings. Also, as a reminder, these data statistics change daily, weekly, or monthly depending on web sources, so this will look different over the next reporting periods from each.

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Last updated: July 06, 2008: 04:22 AM

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