There's an ongoing discussion about the relevance of web statistics, and how to make those properly representative. In online news publishing, the thinking is moving towards a trio of unique users, page views and time spent which gives a better indication of engagement with a site. This is still far from perfect, though.
On TechCrunch this morning Mike Arrington published an interesting mash of data combining comScore's unique user numbers for social networking sites with an estimate (PriceWaterhouseCoopers) of the advertising spend per user. This is applied specifically to social networking sites, which we know are struggling to monetise their networks to meet the level of expectation. And results are weighted to represent the biggest markets being chased by each network.
It's a crude calculation and the figures are better for discussion than regarded as anything official. But the results are curious. MySpace comes out top because it has more users in more lucrative markets.
Facebook has 75% of the value even though, by comScore's figures, it has more users - but has more users in less valuable ad markets. It is interesting to see that LinkedIn (which scored that bumper valuation recently) is only listed 11th; this ratings doesn't take into account the status of the users and clearly LinkedIn is on far studier ground in terms of monetising its userbase.
Not perfect, but richer data than user numbers alone.
1 MySpace.com
2 Facebook.com
3 Bebo.com
4 Hi5.com
5 Amebol.jp
6 Buzznet
7 Skyrock.com
8 Mixi.jp
9 Piczo.com
10 Studivz.net
