There has been quite a bit of confusion around the numbers I (and others) have quoted related to Bebo’s page views, uniques, etc. Jim Scheinman, Bebo’s VP of Business Development and Sales, kindly stopped by and clarified things in the comments of my original post on the company’s $15M financing:

Much of the confusion in the #s above (and frankly in many blog postings) about Bebo’s and other SN site #s come from the mashing of various data sources. So, for example, while Bebo reported 2.5 Billion monthly page views (and we’re actually just shy of 3 Billion now), we never reported the 1 million unique user #. In fact, I’m not sure where that came from, but I suspect it’s a Media Metrix/Comscore unique user # for US members only. Our internal data shows that Bebo overall has significantly higher unique user #s, and you can do the research to see what 3rd parties report our … Read more »

Reading this story by the Deal about the gloomy outlook of Friendster, I came across a chart showing the unique visitors of US social networking sites (provided by Comscore, as of March 2006).

Quite stunning to see that 23% of US Internet users are visiting MySpace (1 in 4).

It would also be very interesting to see the percentage of overlap among visitors of these services.

David Hornik (sitting in fronf on me) tells that combining visitors to Six Apart’s LiveJounal and TypePad would make them rank pretty high on that chart (granted these are blogging platform more than social networking sites).

I came across this New-York Times article about MySpace, its economics and challenges: For MySpace, Making Friends Was Easy. Big Profit Is Tougher (sub req’d). It is full of interesting data points, and is especially interesting in the light of the growing importance MySpace has in the Web 2.0 ecosystem. Not only is MySpace the second largest Internet web site in page served, it has also become a common launchpad for new startups that offer widgets that can be integrated in users’ home pages. Bambi Francisco had a good piece on this “trick” two weeks ago: MySpacenomics (sub req’d).

Interesting snippets:

MySpace now has over 70 million signed users (but the article does not mention how many users are actually active – logging at least once in the last 90 days). As mentioned, only Yahoo serves more pages than MySpace which is getting close to one billion pages per day. The yearly … Read more »

I have attended last night’s session of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) program featuring Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder and CEO of the Facebook, and Jim Breyer, Accel’s Managing Partner who is sitting on the board of the company after his firm led a $13M round of financing (at a rumored $100M-ish post-money valuation).The Terman auditorium was close to full to hear these two share their stories and experiences about the Facebook and its stellar growth. I have written about it in the past right after their financing, and actually this post is one of the most visited on my blog. Also check out their TechCrunch profile (and do read the comments from Facebook users).

Before I get into the actual session, here is an update on their metrics – which are (increasingly) stunning:

5M+ registered users coverage of 45% of US colleges (a total of 2,000 – representing 8M students) 80% penetration among … Read more »