What’s hot on the Internet right now?

As i said yesterday in the Morgan Stanley post , there are a couples of things i found interesting in this report and i decided to share them and blog a little bit around the subjects. And today I’m going to present a graph that presents what’s hot on the Internet right now, what are the web applications and domains that saw the highest raises last year.

As you can see, social networks are the THING of the last couple of years. They didn’t even exist 3-4 year ago and now sites like Myspace, Facebook, Hi5, etc have hundreds of millions of visitors each month.  So no wonder Social Networks reached a growth of around 60% last year. Photos sites, Multimedia portals, Online gaming communities and Instant Messaging software come after that, with growths between 20 to 40%.

But, all these have quite low penetration rates. What does this mean? That they are only used by a specific category of users: the young ones.

More "serious" types of sites, like portals, retail or e-mail servers have higher penetration rates, but that’s perhaps because they have been around for a decade now… So one can only wonder what’s going to be the penetration rate of Social networks in 4-5 year…

"Search" engines are by far the most used web applications, as they have one of the highest penetration rates. Portals like Yahoo, MSN, Live are up there too.

But there’s one thing i find hard to believe: the penetration of auto and travel sites. I can’t believe that only 25% of the Internet users in US (cause yes, the graph above is made after the US Internet market) are interested in auto sites… A little bit odd, don’t you think? 

Tags: Facebook, Myspace, Social networking