World Map Of Social Networks Shows Facebook's Ever-Increasing Dominance
Just in case you had any doubts about the fact we live in the age of Facebook, just check out Vincenzo Cosenza's latest edition of the World Map Of Social Networks. — Based on this month's Alexa & Google Trends …
Context & Ripple Effects
Vincenzo Cosenza's World Map Of Social Networks has been running since mid-2007, when his first edition charted a world still split among national champions rather than one global leader. The December 2010 update, built on Alexa and Google Trends traffic data, shows Facebook holding or taking the lead in market after market.
The snapshot caps three years in which commentators framed the shift as a Facebook revolution and, by late 2009, declared that social networks had come of age as mainstream infrastructure. What was once a contested, regionally fragmented landscape is now, on this map, increasingly monochrome.
First-order effects
- The regional networks that led their home markets in earlier editions of Cosenza's map now face Facebook competing for the same users with a single global product, identity graph, and developer platform.
- Advertisers reading Alexa and Google Trends data see one audience concentrated at global scale, strengthening Facebook's hand in selling ads against locally dominant rivals.
Second-order effects
- Local social networks are pushed toward consolidation, acquisition, or niche positioning as their defensible asset shrinks from geography to language or community.
- Facebook's reported interest in New York's advertising district — a rumored lease at 335 Madison Avenue, unconfirmed by the company — fits the pattern of an audience leader moving closer to where ad budgets are bought.
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory on successive maps holds, social networking trends toward a winner-take-most structure in which network effects concentrate attention, ad spend, and third-party development on one platform, leaving measurement firms like Alexa and Google Trends as the arbiters of that dominance.
The trend: Global social networking is consolidating from a fragmented field of national leaders into a single dominant platform, with traffic-measurement data becoming the public scoreboard of that concentration.