The newest figures are in for social networking/media sites are in from comScore. These figures are for May, 2006 in millions of unique visits. 

To add some perspective, MySpace has grown from 37 million visitors to over 51 million visitors in the span of 4 months - that's a huge growth. Also considering the new buzz going around for multimedia social networking, it should not come as a surprise to note that YouTube has grown from 6.6 million to 12.67 million (92% growth) in only one month.

“The popularity of social networking is not expected to wane in the near future,” said Peter Daboll, president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix. “This is a phenomenon we’re seeing not only in the U.S., but also around the world. The challenge for social networking sites will now be monetization and how advertisers will respond to the global marketing potential of these sites.”

I think we can expect this growth to continue. And, more than anything, to co-mingle. We'll se more overlap between the services, which we can already expect in these figures (many people on YouTube will also be on MySpace, for example). The overlap I expect will come through the merging of services - or, more specifically, the growth of social networking worlds as being comprehensive of all things from blogs to wikis to classifieds to news to music and photos and videos and chat. They will become these worlds of online dialogue and community, which we are only now (I think) starting to see happen.

Indeed, as the article points out, the challenge will not only be to manage the growth of these areas, but their monetization and the changes in online advertising: in the way we approach advertising and the way consumers respond. This is a whole other shift that is happening in response to the growth of online communities, a shift that is even more in its infancy than the online communities themselves.

Expect lots of growth in these areas. And expect to see Qumana there too ;)

Via business2blog ; Tags: social networking, advertising, online advertising, social media, communities, ad landscape, web 2.0