comScore has once again delivered some interesting news regarding Turkish internet. In a press release announcing that Russia has the world's most engaged social networking audience (with 6.6 hours and 1,307 pages average per visitor), Turkish social networking audience is reported to have spent, on average, 3.7 hours and view 427 pages on social networks in May.
Of course, I was very curious to understand what they define as social networking. They have published their Russian data as follows:
| A Selection of Leading Social Networking Sites Ranked by Total Unique Visitors (000)* May 2009 Total Russia, Age 15+ Home & Work Locations Source: comScore World Metrix |
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| Property | Total Unique Visitors (000) | % Reach of Total Online Population |
| Total Russian Internet Audience | 31,907 | 100% |
| Social Networking | 18,877 | 59% |
| Vkontakte.ru | 14,310 | 45% |
| Odnoklassniki.ru | 7,750 | 24% |
| Mail.Ru - My World | 6,321 | 20% |
| Fotostrana.ru | 1,624 | 5% |
| Privet.ru | 942 | 3% |
| Moikrug.ru | 839 | 3% |
| Facebook.com | 616 | 2% |
| Steamcommunity.com | 433 | 1% |
| MySpace Sites | 371 | 1% |
| Vkrugudruzei.ru | 214 | 1% |
As far as I can tell, the description of social networking is not very broad. The list above excludes dating sites like Loveplanet, blogging sites like Blogger and video sites like YouTube. In Turkey, I presume comScore tracked the high-traffic global sites, including Facebook (which dominates the Turkish market), MySpace, Netlog, and the high-presence Turkish sites like Yonja.com, Gayet.net that are explicitly branded as "social networking". Which means they ignored the social networking-type interaction at other social media. One wonders if the online audience engaging in social networking-like interaction is dispersed more broadly in Turkey and extends outside of those properties branded explicitly as "social networking", especially given that Turkey was pointed out by comScore as having the highest-engagement online audience in Europe. (For instance, Turkey has very high-traffic online forums that would not be counted by comScore as social networking).
However, the monetization of social media in Russia is way ahead of Turkey. Last year, there were reports on Odnoklassniki's revenues being estimated at $30m. This is an order of magnitude greater than anything comparable in the Turkish market.
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