OPEN

Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has
kindly posted the slides from her presentation at the Engagement Alliance event
on Wednesday in London (more about that later).

She kicked off her presentation by
playfully poking fun at the old "content is king" adage, like this:

Remember the expression "content is king"? I poked fun at it by
pointing out that only 7 of the top 20 sites based on UK visits are
content creators. These include portals such as Yahoo! and MSN and news
sites, i.e. the BBC. The rest are search engines, social networking
sites, email services and auction sites (AKA eBay).

As you can see in the table below, last month, MySpace ranked #1
among Net Communities and Chat websites in the UK with 13% market share
of UK visits. Bebo ranked #2 with nearly 12% market share. In the US,
meanwhile, MySpace has a much more dominant position, capturing 45%
market share of US visits compared to TheFaceBook, the #2 ranked site,
with 5.14% of US visits.

Top 10 Net Communities and Chat Websites, Based on Share of UK Visits

The rest of her post is a very useful overview of the how and who uses MySpace and Bebo – all the useful stats you could possibly eat.

: : BTW Heather confidently predicts that Bebo will overtake MySpace as the number one social network in the UK by the time schools start back in September.