The Compete Blog published web traffic analysis on social networks, search engines, and popular sites in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
HN commenters cite its traffic data when discussing Tumblr and Pinterest usage, Bing's user base, and social network rankings.
Usage of Tumblr looks surprisingly high (at least for me), according to that graph. Even though that stats are exclusively for the younger segment of users, they don't seem to correlate at all with overall data I've been able to gather. For example:
- Facebook's unique visitors ~160M http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/21/net-us-facebook-users-idUSBRE85J1L020120621
- Tumblr unique visitors ~24M http://blog.compete.com/2012/10/10/pinterest-surpasses-tumblr-in-unique-visitors/
I'm not completely convinced that Bing lacks the user base to compete with Google. There are diminishing returns in user base volume after some point, and Bing has around 100mm US users[1]. I think any of us would be pleased as punch with that volume and it's not clear it's not enough to do something-social-with-search.
[1] http://blog.compete.com/2011/03/16/february-2011-search-market-share-report/
Compete has some details here http://blog.compete.com/2012/01/05/affiliates-pining-for-pinterest/
Pinterest uses Skimlinks to turn all links to retail sites into affiliate links (and in turn they get affiliate money). From the article it looks like this is a good amount of traffic.
> With this "message" on their homepage (which as jaysonelliot pointed out is not even seen by many people)
How is 64% of their traffic (89 million visitors in 2009)[1] not "many people"?
[1]: http://blog.compete.com/2009/04/21/home-page-visitors-top-publisher-sites/
Did you see this research:
Top Social Networks: The Summer of Social?
http://blog.compete.com/2007/07/24/top-social-networks-june-myspace-facebook/
Better to use the permalink:
http://blog.compete.com/2007/04/23/myspace-tom-is-not-my-friend/