Saturday, August 23

Facebook or Orkut?

social

I was mulling over Alexa this weekend, when I decided to compare the web traffics of the three networking sites; facebook, myspace and orkut. The annual traffic graph revealed an interesting picture I must say. The myspace traffic is more or less constant with its brief set of fluctuations, Fox Interactive Media should be a happy puppy. Their market share has remained solid,whew!!

But look at orkut and facebook, facebook (in red) has been steadily growing from milestone to milestone, and recently was crowned as the top social network site on the blue nothing (that's the internet). The sudden spurt you see in all the curves, I think its the announcement of Facebook, when they announced their predator safegaurds. Remember that time in May, when a youth in India was kidnapped by some strangers through orkut? Well, could that explain the sudden dip in orkut traffic?

Strangely, during that time, orkut went the facebook way by having a few orkut apps, could this culture shift have thrown more traffic towards facebook?

I know a lot of people have not put too much thought into social communities, et al, but community management and monetization of the same is the only revenue models for both orkut and facebook. I wonder whether the orkut product manager is breaking a sweat on this? Incidentally, the orkut development and engineering team has shifted entirely to Brazil, where it is the no. 1 social networking site.

Addendum

I don't know how he came across this blog, but Gaurav Dua gave a very logical explanation for the sudden dip in the traffic. If you see the Orkut url, then for Indian users it is nowadays orkut.co.in, same for Brazil, hence the traffic figures have dropped to 33% (approx.). I feel like such a dunderhead :-)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

@prasad

orkut has shifted to country based domains. You can compare orkut.co.in, orkut.com and orkut.com.br to see where traffic is going.

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Unknown said...

@orkutplus, ohhh ... so the traffic was effectively split threeways, hence the dip in the figures! Shucks, I feel like an idiot now :-)

Anonymous said...

@prasad: :-D

by the way, when you login, Orkut gives you an option of both .co.in or .com (just like Yahoo!)

Hypnos said...

Thanks to Orkut's new ishtrategy, I am now able to browse it in my client's office, because those extra smart people have blocked the .com variant, not the .co.in one.

Unknown said...

lol @ amit. Glad to see that orkut's new strategy is benefiting you and them nicely. shall we say a win-win move :-)