Social Media List is a website that lists the existing and emerging social networks worldwide. The idea that led to the creation of Social Media List was a simple question; how many social networks are there in the world? It was impossible to find any exact and up-to-date number on the internet and so we set out to gather our own list. We came across to very interesting findings and decided to share all this information with the world in form of a website dedicated to the listing of Social networks worldwide. The website was launched in April 2018 and it has been a social media reference website since then.
Method and Data of the Listing
In the very beginning of the work we faced a methodological problem: How should we decide which website is a social network and which is not? Because there are so many in-between instances that are hard to categorize. In the end, we preferred a categorization that relied on a very basic social networking definition. If a websites primary operational field is the Social network functions (i.e. Social interaction among the members), we considered this as a social network. In other cases, a website could have a large membership and interaction among members, but if it had other primary operational field, for example if it was an e-commerce website, we excluded it from the list.
Social Media List has been prepared with a careful scanning of the internet sources. Some of these internet sources, for example Wikipedia as one of the largest sources, usually had outdated data and usually lacked the new Networks. So we made our own research in major languages. One other source of data was the companies selling social networking website scripts; their sales at times reached thousands, so that was another source to take a look at. We have tried to confirm the data from other sources as much as we could. If we were not sure about certain networks, we left them out of the list.
The Numbers
The number of social media sites and/or social networking websites is on a rapid increase, though only a few of them are famous globally. Almost everyone on the planet knows about giants like facebook or twitter, but few people know about the fact that there is an astonishing number of social networks currently operating with a membership ranging from a few thousands to a few hundred millions. The current Social Media List includes 250 social networking sites worldwide as of February 2023. Needless to say, the list keeps changing and generally growing. As of publishing this update, we are watching and processing another 50 social Networks which we will add some time in 2023. Thus the list of worldwide Social Networks will rise to 300.
On the other hand, it is rather hard to maintain the actual number of Social Networks worldwide. It came to our attention that the Social Networking habitat is much more shifting than we initially thought of. Almost on a monthly basis, new Social Networks are launched; some old ones are shut down; and still some others change the name to merge with others. That requires a close attention and so we keep monitoring the social media field. One critical issue is the newly emerging Social Networks. Generally speaking, the internet is a graveyard of given-up social network ventures. As the social networking scripts and technology is getting cheaper and readily available online, it becomes all the more appetizing and easy to just buy a script for as cheap as $50, install it on an even cheaper server and there goes another social network. So we dont include to our list just any Social network we come across to, but rather, we watch for a while, make sure that it is alive and growing and only then we include it to our list.
Last thing in terms of the numbers, while it is hard to find out the total number of the Social Networks, it is even harder to find out how many members does each Social network have. Again, the internet sources are contradicting about the numbers of members. Our method is that, if we lack the credible or healthy information about the number of members for a certain Social network, we dont mention the number of members in the listing of that network. But if, however, we have a number that is generally accepted for the membership of a Social network, we do mention it on the respective listing. To solve this problem for once and all, we have now started to communicate with every individual Social network and asked them, among many other questions, the number of their existing members. We will gradually update the listings when we have this information.
How To Use Social Media List
Everyone is free to use Social Media List for personal, academic, study purposes, provided that the due reference and live (clickable) linking is made to our website. Any commercial use and/or copying and publishing it on other websites is strictly prohibited. In this sense, we expect every user to respect the labor and efforts on our side to make this list available.
Lastly, if you happen to use the list data in some critical studies or projects, as is the case with many users of our website, please make sure you double-check the data for any possible latest change which might not be included in our version of data.
Please also feel free to consult us for specific questions. We will respond with what we can.
Cemal Atila
Social Media ListFebruary 2023