Battle of social networks: How long can Orkut keep Facebook at bay in Brazil?

September 14, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler | Comments | |

brazil

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Orkut still dominates the Brazilian market: it attracted 22.7 million unique visitors last month. The next closest competitor, Windows Live Profile, brought in roughly a third of that traffic with 8 million visitors, according to the Comscore numbers. Facebook comes in at eighth place with 1.3 million.

But if Facebook’s performance in Latin America so far is anything to go by, it may not be in eighth place for long, and Orkut should be looking over its shoulder.

Facebook surpassed Orkut as the leader in Latin America as a whole in February of this year, according to Comscore. Facebook attracted 33.6 million unique visitors compared to Google-run Orkut’s 24 million in July. Facebook also left rival Hi5 in the dust last August even though Hi5 was beating Facebook in Latin America with 15.3 million users in July 2008, according Comscore’s data. And in Brazil Facebook’s apparently claiming 100-200k new users a month at the moment.

Below are some old maps showing market leaders in different countries over the last two years. You can see that two years ago, Latin America was divided among several competitors including
MySpace, Fotolog, Hi5 and Orkut. Now it has consolidated under Facebook with Brazil as the outlier under Orkut. That’s not super-surprising — Brazil is the only country on the continent where the population speaks Portuguese rather than Spanish, a fact that could be keeping it somewhat insulated from Facebook’s onslaught, at least for now. But Brazil also has some 67 million internet users, or almost half the total number of internet users in Latin America (according to 2008 figures from Internet World Stats), so it’s no wonder so many social networks are putting up a fight for a presence there.

The question until now has been, will the world see the social networking market divided along national and linguistic lines, or will one company emerge as a worldwide leader in this globalized age? If Facebook keeps up its momentum, it could soon answer that.

From June 2007, based on Alexa traffic:
world-map-social-networks

From June 2009, based on Alexa traffic:
world-map-social-networks2

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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler

Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Facebook does it - wrests lead in Latin America from Orkut, Hi5 http://bit.ly/czqvo
  • Sehwag Fan
    Orkut is the best
  • I know orkut since the beginning in Brazil and there are brazilian communities very strong in this social network. This kind of relationship you don't find in Facebook, that has a focus in friendship, that is more limited. I have not 8000 friends, but a have 8000 potencial readers in only one community where I am a member. I use Facebook for friends and events, but I never will leave my communities in orkut.
  • Facebook getting more popular now a days but i still love orkut ..
  • henrique
    orkut is a community of porn.type penis and u get it.whent it launched it have had no security at all.and right now is copying everything from facebook.
  • Hi,
    I am currently using orkut and facebook i always choose orkut as my regular usage..
    Because orkut was really nice social site and this article giving me info about orkut so i really like it..