620,000,000 profiles

May 6, 2008 § 2 Comments

I’ve recently been doing some analysis focusing on the growth rates of major social networks and resume databases (I’m saving major blogging platforms for another day, although I’m guessing there are ~400M blogs out there). For the purposes of this analysis I calculated the user profile CAGR for each major social network and resume database, assuming 1M profiles in the launch year and ending with the best estimate of user profiles today (May 2008).

The results show that there are nearly 620,000,000 robust user profiles among these services today, a figure that has grown at a 64% CAGR since ’95. Orkut has grown at the highest CAGR (231%) while MySpace claims the largest raw number of profiles (173M). The chart below nicely illustrates the social networking explosion staring in ’03, underlined by the steady growth of resume databases starting in the mid 90s. The exponentially higher growth rates of social networks can be attributed to the viral features that have come to define them. Traditional resume databases are useful but are generally non-viral so they continue to grow steadily. This analysis does not take into account spam and fake profiles and the chart massively simplifies the growth trends by retrospectively applying each company’s CAGR.

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