Why the social media matters to Singapore
If you’re having trouble convincing your bosses, colleagues, or clients that the social media matters to Singaporeans, you might want to point them to the Hitwise Singapore datacentre where statistics on Singapore’s Internet usage is publicly published.
This is their latest update of top 20 websites visited by Singaporeans as of November 2006:
As you can see, within the top 20, we have:
- Blogger.com (with millions of blogs)
- YouTube (where user created videos are shared)
- Friendster (the most popular social networking platform in Singapore and Asia)
- MSN.com (with still more blogs, among other content including news)
- Yahoo Singapore (with social Q&A, discussions groups, auctions, classifieds, news)
- Google (with discussion groups, social co-op search engines, news)
Putting aside the sites that are services like Yahoo Mail, Poems.com.sg, etc, I’m curious why more traffic flows to the social media sites above than say, Channel News Asia’s website or any other any other mainstream media’s site like IHT.com.
Could it be our countrymen get enough of their online information from blogs? Is Google’s robot-picked news doing such a good job people don’t bother looking else where? Are our youth spending countless hours watching silly videos on YouTube?
I’m not one to comment on the social implications of the social media, but what I can say is that’s where everyone’s headed. Me included!
But just to lend support to the mainstream media, the last time I checked in August 2006, among the top 20 was… I couldn’t believe it either… Zaobao.com!
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Interesting list by Hitwise. I noticed that other than the social media sites, search engines also figure promptly. Surprised though that technorati isn’t in there, and neither is flickr.
I believe that Zaobao.com has a huge readership largely from China. For their online denizens, any alternative Chinese source of news apart from state-owned Xinhuanet is a good one. This probably led to the very high number of hits.
I don’t think many Singaporeans really subscribe to the idea of social meda knowingly. It is important, but we still are quite in the dark as to why social media is important.
The general gist is that most of the time, we are following, trying to play catch up to the innovation all around us.
So in a way, as the cool insider mentioned, flickr and technorati ain’t ther simply because we have a “me too” attitude here in Singapore. Most of the time its because the services we use fit our needs and then we just stop there. We don’t look for other alternatives or try out other forms of social media.
And our friends follow suit.
Interesting how Gmail appears so low on the list. I thought its use was more widespread than that.
Accessed from theory.isthereason.com.
Looks like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are more popular in Singapore.
Interesting trivia: http://www.singaporepools.com made it to the list back in August.