Facebook, MySpace and Orkut are three of the most popular social networking sites available today. But how do they compare against each other while all of them were in operations?

Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. MySpace is a social networking website headquartered in Beverly Hills, California, where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media, owned by News Corporation. Orkut is a social networking website that is owned and operated by Google Inc. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten and has over 100 million active users currently.

Facebook, Myspace and Orkut have a rank of 1, 12 and 77 respectively as of today amongst all websites. The following figures compare the visits profile for the three sites.

Traffic percentage wise of daily internet users, daily reach Facebook is way ahead of MySpace and Orkut. Orkut however beats MySpace.

Comparing the traffic of each individual sites, from geographical location, an interesting trend emerges.

It is apparent that United States is by far the biggest user of Social Networking sites, and is the biggest traffic contributor for Facebook and MySpace. Similarly, Orkut is more popular in India and Brazil.

The average time spent by the users of each site also present a nice comparative analysis. People spend more time in Facebook as compared to Orkut. However myspace appears to score pretty low on this metric.

What might be the cause of such variation of consumer preferences since all three apparently offer variations of the same food on a slightly different plate? Any suggestions?

Data source: http://alexa.com

By Kar

Dr. Kar works in the interface of digital transformation and data science. Professionally a professor in one of the top B-Schools of Asia and an alumni of XLRI, he has extensive experience in teaching, training, consultancy and research in reputed institutes. He is a regular contributor of Business Fundas and a frequent author in research platforms. He is widely cited as a researcher. Note: The articles authored in this blog are his personal views and does not reflect that of his affiliations.