Mediaboss Marketing

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/bv92fn/social_networking) has announced the addition of the "Social Networking & Social Media: 2012 to 2016" report to their offering.

Social media is a once-in-a-generation, global phenomenon that is changing the world, unquestionably for the better. Whether it is Caracas or Boston, Auckland or Budapest, anywhere where there is an internet connection, in fact, social media is deeply and irrevocably embedded in the online world.

In spite of having first emerged just ten years ago, by the end of 2012 1.9 billion people around the globe will be actively using social media services, which represents over 85 percent of the entire online population. By 2016, these figures will have increased to 2.5 billion and nearly 90 percent respectively.

While social media unquestionably delivers huge value to users right around the globe, the business aspects of this new industry display some strange characteristics, such as:

- In spite of its global reach, utility and pervasive nature, the actual value of the social media market is rather modest, at just USD 10.4 billion in 2012 and USD 19.4 billion in 2016. By way of comparison, the size of the worldwide online advertising market in 2012 will be USD 114 billion while the worldwide Pay-TV market will be worth USD 275 billion;

- When a like-for-like comparison is made with traditional media forms, like newspapers, television, books and radio, fundamental reasons mean that the social media industry is only able to harvest a small percentage of the value delivered to users: newspaper industry ARPUs are more than 12x larger than social media;

- The market value of creating the content that was added to Facebook in 2011 was USD 6.4 billion, compared with company revenues of USD 3.71 billion. Facebook effectively outsourced these costs to users, but has no plan to remunerate those users for their efforts, other than providing a free service;

- We project that Facebook's share of the worldwide social media market in 2012 will be in excess of 50 percent. With a total market size of just USD 19.4 billion in 2016, the social media market is not large enough to sustain the growth of Facebook for more than a few more years. and so the company must enter major, new markets.

This report explains these and many other aspects of the social media market in detail against a background of detailed company profiles (21 leading social media companies are profiles) and worldwide analysis (24 leading countries are profiled).

Go here to read the rest:
Research and Markets: Social Networking & Social Media: 2012 to 2016