Social Networking revenue to jump 475% to US$1.9B in 2013

I picked up the latest edition of the economist today.

It's got Steve Jobs on the cover (why i picked it up), but also features an 18 page special report on social networking.

If you haven't picked one up yet, I suggest you do as it makes for some very interesting and insightful reading.

As I initially flicked through the report a small graph caught my eye, it was labeled 'Money Talks' and forcasted the growth of web 2.0 revenues from 2009-2013.

I'll detail the list below as I can't find a link to it online (all behind a paywall),

web 2.0 revenues by technology, $m

2009 2013

RSS $190m $575m
Blogs $200m $325m
Wikis $180m $450m
Mashups $100m $675m
Podcasting $75m $275m
Widgets $75m $350m


Social Networking $425m $1.997b

I knew social networking was no where near being mature from a monitsation point of view, but a near 500% jump in revenue over a 4 year period is insane.

Who or what do you think is going to take in most of this revenue an how do you think its going to be done?

Google now indexing 620 Million facebook groups

Cut out the usual 1/4 of the results below (as they're spammers or screenscrapers) and you reach a relative figure of around 620M.



Thats almost as many videos on youtube (684 according to Google).

There is currently around 2.5M fan pages on facebook, so you get an idea of how integral groups really are to the entire facebook experience.

Groups are old school though and produce far less engagement than Pages, this is partly due to the way facebook has engineered pages, they have more reach into the social graph therefore they're going to produce more engagement and more insight for brands.

With that in mind, the real benefits of Google having access to facebook data will be seen when facebook Pages become more widely available to the search engine.