Social Media Networking Sites You Need to Know About - part 1
Social Media Networking Sites You Need to Know About
(A report in three parts) PART 1
The rapid adoption of social media is changing how we find friends, partners and lovers, how we receive news and effect political change. Human nature is programmed to be socially active and people have always been looking for ways to connect and find friends, help us to survive and thrive.
Some are more active than others. People have found ways to network with each other using hugs, conversations, speeches, letters, radio, phones, television and, more recently, computers and mobiles.
Social media is by far the most popular service available on the Internet. It can share information, spread brand awareness and it can make or break your business. If you’re not utilising social media effectively, you’re missing out on a whole new potential market of consumers.
Social media sites have grown in numbers by leaps and bounds and now social media usage is one of the most popular activities.
In 2020 there are around 7.7 billion people in the world and an estimated 3.6 billion people are using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to almost 4.4 billion in 2025.
Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world, has 2.4 billion users. Other social media platforms including YouTube and Whatsapp also have more than one billion users each.
Social media has changed the world. The rapid and vast adoption of these technologies is changing how we find friends, partners and lovers, how we read and receive news and effect political change.
1-20 of 63 Social Media Sites in Alphabetical Order
1 - Badoo
This dating-focused social networking site operates in more than 200 countries.
It shares details about people nearby in your area and even about people whom you may have bumped into in real life it the world's most widely used dating network. The app is available on iOS, Android, and the web.
Badoo has several features that enable users to meet people. When they first sign up, individuals select whether they want to meet new people to date, chat or to make new friends.
Users can chat, match with others, upload photos and videos, as well as share their interests and see any friends in common.
It was founded by the Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev in 2006 and it has headquarters in Limassol, Cyprus and London, UK.
It also has offices in Malta, Russia and the US and it operates in 190 countries and is available in 47 different languages.
Number of active users per month: 20 million approximately
2 - Baidu Tieba
Baidu Tieba is the most used Chinese communication platform hosted by Chinese search engine company Baidu, and was established on December 3, 2003.
Baidu Tieba (known as Postbar internationally) is a social forum network based on the keyword searches in the Baidu search engine.
Baidu Search Engine is one of the most used Search Engines in the World, especially in China. With a large 55% market share, it monopolises the local market.
Early on in the life of Baidu, this Chinese giant chose to increase its range of services to control its core market.
Baidu Zhidao is very similar to a giant bulletin board system where a user can create their own small community about a topic they like.
This discussion forum works on the unique concept of allowing you to create a social network group for a specific topic, using the search, or even to join an existing online social group.
It was released to the public on December 3, 2003. It is a completely user-driven network service. The idea of the paste bar came from Yu Jun, Baidu's Chief Product Designer.
Around the same time, the paste bar was combined with the Baidu search engine to build an online communication platform, letting people communicate to those with similar interests.
On February 25, 2005, Barzhu Bar became an official platform of Baidu Tieba, and was used for communication between the owners of different bars
Number of active users per month is approximately 300 million and the number of its total registered users has reached 1.5 billion.
3 - Buzznet
This social media site allows users to share content on the basis of their personal interests in the form of videos, photos and journals.
Breaking the mold of traditional social networks, Buzznet’s multi-faceted social media platform enables its users to create and program vibrant and authentic multimedia communities around the music and pop culture topics they are most passionate about.
Updated more frequently and offering the most content of any music media site on the web, Buzznet bolters more than 10 million active music fans who use the site’s tools for personal expression, to connect with friends and to share millions of photos and videos, creating the ultimate music media experience.
Buzznet is a website for people to discuss different kinds of music. Banners displayed on the homepage link to Buzznet’s contest groups and Buzznet polls. Each Buzznet contest is typically endorsed by a band, celebrity, or record label.
Past contests include “Get Dressed by Avril” Merch Model Search, endorsed by pop-rock icon, Aviril Lavigne and "Feel the Elite Beat" Dance Video Contest sponsored by Nintendo. The homepage also links to music features, festival updates, and Internet stars.
User pages are controlled by individual members and can be customised with colors and text. Upon sign in, registered members are prompted to upload videos, photos, or post journals, all of which can be tagged to appropriate tag topic pages.
Tag topic pages house all photos, videos, journals, and links that have been tagged to a particular topic. Topics are most commonly a band, celebrity, or content genre.
Tag topic pages also have a user-generated forum that hosts open discussions on subjects related to the tag.
Group pages have features similar to tag topic pages, but are generally more content-specific and exclusive. Group pages are generally used for contests, events, and fan bases.
Buzznet.com was founded by Marc Brown, Steve Haldane, Kevin Woolery and Anthony Batt (CEO). The site was officially launched in 2005 when the company received private funding from Anthem Venture Partners.
The network was sold to Hive Media in September 2016.
4 - CafeMom
CafeMom is a website targeted to mothers and mothers-to-be. It is owned by Wild Sky Media, which also owns Mom.com, CafeMedia, MamásLatinas, and LittleThings.
This ad-supported social networking website is a community for mothers and mothers-to-be that enables them to get support and advice on various topics, such as pregnancy, fashion, health and food.
It also helps them learn from the experiences of other mothers. Topics that range from mothering topics such as pregnancy, breastfeeding, and parenting kids of a certain age to topics on politics, popular trends, relationships, and groups geared towards drama. The range is vast.
There were also other elements to the site other than forums such as chat rooms and instant messenger, a question and answer area, articles from The Stir and associated sites, games, the ability to customise the profiles in detail, and much more.
CafeMom was founded in 2006 by Michael Sanchez and Andrew Shue and earlier in 1999, the childhood friends established CMI Marketing and subsequently ClubMom, the predecessor to CafeMom.
ClubMom was a web site that provided parenting information in the form of blogs, articles and message boards. It also organised a shopping rewards program with sponsors. ClubMom ran until 2007, until it was shuttered in favor of CafeMom.
The idea of CafeMom originated with Andrew Shue when he became a father and he saw how his wife counted on other mothers for support and information. Shue realised that there was a need for mothers to share and talk with other women and there was nothing out there that was bringing them together.
In 2015 there was a corporate name change from CafeMom to CafeMedia, as well as its two new upcoming properties that will serve millennial women.
CafeMedia has grown its business by becoming number one with the mom audience, reaching 30 million monthly visitors across its properties which include CafeMom, The Stir, MamasLatinas, and Baby Name Wizard.
While the company remains committed to serving moms, the corporate name change acknowledges the company's expanded vision to serve additional audiences, starting with another huge and critically important audience: millennial women.
CafeMedia already reaches 37% of the 37 million millennial women in the United States through its owned and operated properties and social platforms, making the audience an obvious starting point.
"We realised that our deep industry know-how and the proprietary platform that we've developed serving moms could be applied to other key audiences," explained CafeMedia CEO and Co-Founder, Michael Sanchez. "Recognising how multi-dimensional and diverse millennial women are, we are launching three distinct platforms that allow us to leverage deep insights to serve each group in unique and customised ways."
The site connects more than 6 million mothers, providing them a virtual meeting place where they can find each other for conversation and support about motherhood and life.
By 2010, the site had $30 million in revenue and in June 2018, Wild Sky Media acquired the website.
5 - Care2
This social media site helps activists connect around the globe with similar individuals, businesses and organisations that are making an impact on society.
Care2 was created as a means for liberal and environmental activists to come together and share information about their causes.
Care2 was founded by Randy Paynter in 1998. The goal of the site is to connect activists from around the world with other individuals, organisations and responsible businesses making an impact.
It also encourages people to lead a healthy and green lifestyle.
Care2 is a network of millions of people around the globe, with its aim to building a better world.
They say they use cutting-edge technology and a team of experienced campaigners to fuel the progressive movement by uniting members with nonprofits and mission-based brands working on the causes that people about.
6 - Cellufun
This social gaming community can easily be accessed on the move from any mobile device.
With this mobile gaming-based social network, users can socialise, create avatars, play games and purchase virtual goods.
Cellufun, briefly known as Tylted, is a social gaming community accessible from any mobile device, from the latest smartphones and tablets to the smallest feature phones. Cellufun is different from most other social networks, as it is anonymous, with users creating avatars to represent themselves.
This has resulted in Cellufun ranking #117 in the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies.
By blending chat and a large catalog of social games, and as verified by comScore it has the highest user engagement numbers of any mobile internet site.
In February 2013, six years after the company's original venture financing round the Cellufun website and the Cellufun and Tylted brands were reacquired by two of its founders, Steve Dacek and Arthur Goikhman, who are operating the website under the Cellufun brand.
Based on Wall Street in New York City, the company was founded in 2005 by Cary Torkelson, Arthur Goikhman and Stephen Dacek. For several years, the company relied on advertising as its sole source of revenue.
In mid-2009, Tylted added a new revenue stream by introducing a premium virtual currency called "FunCoins" to complement the existing "earned" point system called Cellupoints.
While all of Cellufun's games and applications remained free to play, the introduction of FunCoins opened up some premium content such as unique avatar clothes and special in-game advantages to those who wished to purchase the new currency.
Cellufun's community, back in July 2009 consisted of over 2 million registered users.
In addition to casino games, board games and traditional social titles like Special Ops, MOBile Wars, Farm World, Mobile Chef and Pocket Beanie Babies, Tylted also produces games based on current news and events. "Made-off" was based upon the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme.
Gulf Rescue raised awareness about the devastating oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico, and a percentage of all virtual goods revenues were donated to the Greater New Orleans Foundation. Some of the chat sections are used for other things such as role play.
Cellufun's core audience is 18-34-years-olds, 55 percent of whom are women.
With more than 220 million monthly page views and 5 million unique visitors a month, Cellufun is a mobile community where people socialise, play games and buy virtual goods for self-expression, gifting and competitive advantage.
People worldwide can access the Cellufun platform on any mobile network, on any phone and in more than ten languages to create personal avatars, compete, collaborate, chat and celebrate special occasions.
Cellufun has its own mobile game publishing platform, and the company releases one or two new games per month.
Cellufun partners with global brands and media companies such as AOL and Gannet's USA Today to deliver branded entertainment and custom-designed mobile marketing services.
Cellufun is one of the world's largest mobile social gaming community where people meet, shop, and play social games. It is available on any phone with a data plan with no download required and can be accessed in 10 different languages.
Cellufun partners with mobile operators and media companies such as Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, MetroPCS, Virgin Mobile, AOL, and USA Today to deliver branded entertainment and custom-designed mobile marketing solutions. Cellufun garners over 200 million page views per month.
7 - Classmates
Classmates.com is a social networking service founded on November 17, 1995 by, a former Boeing manager, Randy Conrads as Classmates Online, Inc.
Conrad had wanted to track down a classmate he knew back in high school. But despite the global nature of the World Wide Web, he wasn't successful.
He sat down with his son to figure out a way to make it easier to reconnect with old friends and classmates. Eventually this project developed into Classmates.com, the first big social networking site on the Web.
It originally sought to help users find class members and colleagues from kindergarten, primary school, high school, college, workplaces, and the US military.
Classmates allows users to find, connect and keep in touch with friends and acquaintances from school and college.
It is also possible for users to upload their yearbook from their school years. Classmates has around 70 million members from over 90 percent of US high schools.
In August 2015, Classmates was acquired from United Online by PeopleConnect Holdings, Inc., a portfolio company of H.I.G. Capital, LLC, for $30 million. Classmates is now operated as a division of PeopleConnect, which also owns Intelius.
8 - Delicious - which is now part of Pinboard
It is known for being the leading social bookmarking service.
Having been launched in 2003, Delicious is ideal for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks. It also allows its users to tag them with any keywords.
Delicious was a social bookmarking web site for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.
The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs.
Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems in April 2011, and the site relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year. In May 2014, AVOS sold the site to Science Inc. In January 2016 Delicious Media, a new alliance, reported it had assumed control of the service.
On June 1, 2017, Delicious was acquired by Pinboard, and the bookmarking service was discontinued in favor of Pinboard's paid subscription-based service. As of August 2019, the site is inactive.
When Pinboard launched in July 2009, it charged an approximately $3 signup fee for new users. This fee automatically increased by a fraction of a cent for each new user, a system intended to slow the growth of the site, to make enough money to sustain development, and to discourage spammers from joining.
A few months later Cegłowski released an option to save ("archive") copies of bookmarked web pages with a $25 yearly subscription fee, and Pinboard became his full-time job with 1,200 users.
New users joined Pinboard at a gradual pace until December 2010, when information leaked from Yahoo! indicated an uncertain future for Delicious, which it had owned since 2005. Many people reacted by joining Pinboard; it grew to 16,000 users by the end of the month, with a signup fee incrementally increased to $9.
By October 2011, Pinboard had 25,000 registered users (including 18,000 active users) and continued to be a one-person company. Following these changes at Delicious, many members of fiction and fandom communities switched from using Delicious to Pinboard, especially after Cegłowski solicited feature suggestions from the fan community and received a detailed and organised collective response.
In January 2015, Pinboard switched to charging an $11 annual fee for new accounts instead of an automatically-increasing one-time signup fee.
On 1 June 2017, Pinboard acquired Delicious. Delicious users were no longer able to save new bookmarks after June 15, 2017. Delicious users have the option to export their bookmarks or migrate to a Pinboard subscription account instead.
9 - DeviantArt
DeviantArt is regarded as the largest online social networking community for art lovers and artists.
It enables users to take photos of their artwork and share them with others.
DeviantArt is an online community featuring artwork, videography and photography. It was launched on August 7, 2000 by Angelo Sotira, Scott Jarkoff, Matthew Stephens, and others. Artworks are organised in a category structure, including photography, digital.
In 2011, it was the thirteenth largest social network with 3.8 million weekly visits.
In 2017, the site had over 26 million members and 251 million submissions. On February 23, 2017, the company announced it was being acquired by Wix.com in a $36 million deal.
Due to the nature of DeviantArt as an art community with worldwide reach, companies use DeviantArt to promote themselves and create more advertising through contests.
Members can build groups that any registered member of the site can join. These groups are usually based on an artist's chosen medium and content.
Some examples of these are Literature (poetry, prose, etc.), Drawing (traditional, digital, or mixed-media), Photography (macro, nature, fashion, stills), and many others. Within these groups are where they do collaborations and have their art featured and introduced to artists of the same kind.
In order to communicate on a more private level, Notes can be sent between individual members, like an email within the site
Occasionally, DeviantArt hosts a meeting for members to come together in real life and interact, exchange, and have fun. There have been meetings for the birthday of DeviantArt, called "Birthday Bashes", as well as simple general get-togethers around the world.
In 2010, European DeviantArt members held a deviantMEET to celebrate DeviantArt's birthday in August.
The site has over 358 million images which have been uploaded by its over 35 million registered members.
10 - Discord
Discord is one of the most popular platforms right now with over 250 million users, and is growing with at least a million every week.
It was designed for gamers to voice and text chat. It’s 100% free, secure, and works on both your desktop and phone.
Discord is a proprietary freeware instant messaging and VoIP application and digital distribution platform designed for creating communities ranging from gamers to education and businesses.
Discord specialises in text, image, video and audio communication between users in a chat channel.
A great free alternative to the premium services such as TeamSpeak.
Starting in June 2020, Discord announced it was shifting focus away from video gaming specificity to a more all-purpose communication and chat client for all functions, revealing its new slogan "Your place to talk" and a revised website.
Among other planned changes would be to reduce the number of gaming in-jokes it uses within the client, improving the user onboarding experience, and increasing server capacity and reliability.
The company announced it had received an additional US$100 million in investments to help with these changes.
11 - Douban
This Chinese social networking site has something for registered as well as unregistered users.
It enables registered users to record information and create content based on music, films, books and events in the cities of China.
Unregistered users of Douban can find reviews and ratings of books, music and movies.
It can be seen as one of the most influential Web 2.0 websites in China.
Douban has over 60 million registered users and 150 million unregistered frequent visitors. Most of them are degree holders who live in major cities and lead a middle-class lifestyle.
They use Douban, a forum-like social media platform, to share their views and ideas on topics they’re interested in.
And so if you want to see what Chinese people think about a book or movie or read their opinions on politics and social issues related, Douban is a great resource to start.
You can also gain a deeper insight into the views of the Chinese public through the blog posts found on Douban.
12 - Facebook
This is the largest social networking site in the world and one of the most widely used.
Facebook began in February of 2004 as a school-based social network at Harvard University. It was created by Mark Zuckerberg along with Edward Saverin, both students at the college.
It wasn't until 2006 that Facebook opened to anyone 13 years or older and took off, rapidly overtaking MySpace as the most popular social network in the world.
Facebook's success can be attributed to its ability to appeal to both people and businesses and its ability to interact with sites around the web by providing a single login that works across multiple sites.
Users can post comments, share photographs, and post links to news or other interesting content on the web, chat live, and watch short-form video.
Apart from the ability to network with friends and relatives, you can also access different Facebook apps to sell online and you can even market or promote your business, brand and products by using paid Facebook ads.
Some of the leading industries on Facebook include financial services, ecommerce, retail, gaming, entertainment, media, telecom, technology, consumer goods, and automotive businesses.
And, Facebook was the first to pass the landmark of 1 billion user accounts.
In 2018 Facebook lost some of the trust of its millions of users by allowing 3rd parties to access over 87 million users’ personal data.
This was a massive breach of trust and has created a feeling of unrest amongst the social media platform’s audience.
Facebook greatly reduced the amount of data that was available to third parties in 2014, but not before a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan had used an app to extract the information of more than 50 million people, and then transferred it to Cambridge Analytica for commercial and political use.
Cambridge Analytica had purchased Facebook data on tens of millions of Americans without their knowledge to build a “psychological warfare tool,” which it unleashed on US voters to help elect Donald Trump as president.
Cambridge Analytica closed operations in 2018 in the course of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” Zuckerberg wrote.
He noted that the company has already changed some of the rules that enabled the breach, but added: “We also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”
Facebook has now got confidence back and currently the number of active users is approximately 1.59 billion per month.
13 - Flickr
Flickr is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community.
It is a photo-sharing website and serves as a platform to upload numerous high quality images, especially by photographers or people who love photography.
It is also an efficient online photo management and sharing service.
A user uploading an image can set privacy controls that determine who can view the image. A photo can be flagged as either public or private.
Private images are visible by default only to the uploader, but they can also be marked as viewable by friends and/or family.
Privacy settings also can be decided by adding photographs from a user's photostream to a "group pool". If a group is private all the members of that group can see the photo. If a group is public the photo becomes public as well.
It was created by Ludicorp a Canadian company in Vancouver in 2004 by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake and has been popular with hosting high resolution photos by amateur and professional photographers.
It has changed ownership several times and has been owned by SmugMug since April 20, 2018.
As of March 20, 2013, Flickr had a total of 87 million registered members and more than 3.5 million new images uploaded daily.
On August 5, 2011, the site reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images.
Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need to register an account, but an account must be made to upload content to the site.
Registering an account also allows users to create a profile page containing photos and videos that the user has uploaded and also grants the ability to add another Flickr user as a contact.
14 - Flixster
This is an American social networking site for people who love movies and want to connect with like-minded people by sharing their movie reviews and ratings.
Flixster was an American social-networking movie website for discovering new movies, learning about movies, and meeting others with similar tastes in movies.
The site allowed users to view movie trailers as well as learn about new and upcoming movies at the box office.
Its users are likely to learn about movies and get information about new movies.
In June 2019, Flixster announced that it will shut down its streaming video services in all countries that Flixster Video operates outside of the US on October 31, 2019 due to the shutdown of UltraViolet.
Customers in these areas were asked to transfer their content to Google Play, although Flixster warned users that due to rights restrictions, not all videos purchased on a Flixster library would be transferable depending on country.
A standout feature on Flixster is its integration with the social networking powerhouse Facebook. Facebook users can add the Flixster application to their profiles and begin rating movies and taking quizzes.
Facebook publishes any Flixster activity to the user's feed, which attracts other users to join in. Flixster also offers an application for the iPhone, allowing users to view trailers, rate movies and search for local movie times, no matter where they are.
When users create a profile on Flixster, they can rate movies as well as list their favorite actors, movies and videos. They can browse the site to find other users with similar interests.
Specialised forums allow users to discuss movies by genre, as well as other subjects, some related to movies, some not. The site also includes a user-built wiki, which discusses the history of movies.
The wiki contains pages on subjects like independent film, comic book-based movies and blockbusters. Users are encouraged to add their own articles to the wiki.
Between November 2006 and January 2007, the number of daily page views reported for Flixster by Alexa Toolbar users rose from fewer than 20 million to around 50 million
By September 2010, its popularity had waned significantly; its 2.98 million a month.
Currently Flixster has more than 15 million unique monthly visitors who've provided almost two billion movie ratings.
15 - Foursquare
Foursquare is a social networking service available for common smartphones, including the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android-powered phones.
The app's purpose is to help you discover and share information about businesses and attractions around you.
This local search and discovery-based social media platform that enables you to find the ideal places, based on your location, to go to with friends and loved ones.
It also gives appropriate search results for the best food outlets, night entertainment places and more in your area.
The social networking feature is now available in a separate app named Swarm.
In 2020 Foursquare Labs Inc. merged with yet another location-focused startup, Factual Inc.
The combination of Foursquare and Factual generated more than $150 million in revenue, in more than 20 global markets, and trusted by thousands of companies of all sizes and in various industries, including Microsoft, Uber, Samsung, Snap, Twitter, and more than half of the Fortune 100.
Foursquare’s data, with over 3 billion visits/month around the globe, 105 million global venues, and 25 million people globally (both in and outside of the apps, via the Pilgrim SDK) who have opted in to always-on location sharing, is incredibly valuable to advertisers, businesses and developers.
The service was created in late 2008 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen and was launched in 2009
Number of current active users is approximately 40 million.
16 - Friendster
Friendster was previously a social networking site to find friends and stay in touch, but is now a social gaming network for game lovers in Asia.
Friendster was a US social networking site based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003. The company was sold in 2015 and became a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts.
The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via profiles and networks. It is considered one of the original social networks.
After the launching of Friendster as a social gaming platform in June 2011, the number of registered users reached over 115 million. The company operated mainly from three Asian countries: the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore, and over 90% of the site's traffic came from Asia.
As of 2008, Friendster had more monthly unique visitors than any other social network in Asia.
On June 14, 2015 Friendster, citing "the evolving landscape in our challenging industry" and lack of engagement by the online community, suspended their services.
Three years later, on June 30, 2018 it closed down as a company and eventually dissolved. It was believed that on January 1, 2019, the web domain would be permanently deactivated until further notice.
As of September 2020, the domain is still accessible, functioning as a redirect to the investor relations page of MOL's website.
17 - Funny or Die
This comedy video social website is aimed at bringing together the funniest videos from the web.
Celebrities follow this social platform a lot and it enables users to share, upload and rate videos.
Funny or Die started in 2007 when Will Ferrell and Adam McKay decided to make a video about a foul-mouthed toddler who wanted her rent money.
It contains exclusive material from a regular staff of in-house writers, producers, and directors, and occasionally from a number of famous contributors.
They have been making funny videos and have worked with everyone from Zach Galifianakis to Charlize Theron to President Barack Obama, making shorts about everything from hover boards to forehead tittaes to interviews that happen between two ferns.
From that core, they have evolved into a full-service comedy studio.
They created dozens of long-form specials and series, including American Vandal (Netflix), Brockmire (IFC), and The Royal Wedding Live with Cord and Tish (HBO).
They have now got millions of fans on social media, and we’ve won Emmys and Peabody Awards for our TV shows and Clios and Golden Lions for our branded content.
The site was hit hard in 2016 when Facebook, YouTube and other social media sites adjusted their algorithms and siphoned page views away from destination sites.
Now, after years of slimming down and recalibrating itself, Funny or Die hopes that it is poised to succeed in the streaming era.
The website has over 40 million followers.
18 - Gaia Online
Gaia Online is an anime-themed social networking and forums-based website. It is a place where teens can create their own space and express their individual style.
It is an English-language, anime-themed social networking and forums-based website. It was founded as go-gaia on February 18, 2003, and the name was changed to GaiaOnline.com in 2004 by its owner, Gaia Interactive.
It gives users access to avatars, virtual world, games and members gather to discuss random stuff, make new friends, complain about life, argue about nothing, laugh at dumb pictures, discuss serious issues and/or curse like sailors.
Founded in 2003, Gaia Online is the leading teen hangout on the web. More than five million visitors come to Gaia every month to make friends, play games, watch movies in Gaia Cinemas, Gaia's virtual theaters, and participate in the world's most active online community.
Gaia provides a fun, social environment that inspires individuality and creativity. With everything from art contests to discussion forums on poetry, politics, celebrities and more, to fully customisable profiles, digital characters and cars.
Gaia won the 2007 Webware 100 award in the Community category and was included in Time magazine's list of 50 best websites in 2008.
In January 2011, the company won the Mashable Best User Experience Award for 2010.
By 2019 the Gaia Online Community is an anime and manga related website, featuring a bank of links, an anime art repository, and a role-playing oriented message board.
These forums present a number of innovative and original ideas such as a cartoon-like discussions layout, completely customisable avatars for which you can buy items in a shop, or a rather sophisticated money system allowing you to spend and earn gold in various ways.
19 - Google+
Google+ was shut down for business and personal use on April 2, 2019.
Google+ continued to be available as "Google+ for G Suite", later rebranded as Google Currents.
Google+ is being phased out due to “low usage” and because it turned into something of a security liability for Google; the company has disclosed two significant data leaks that could have exposed information for tens of millions of Google+ users to outside developers.
Owned by the tech giant Alphabet (Google), this interest-based social networking platform enabled you to stay in touch with people by sharing messages, photos, videos, useful links to sites and so on.
It also extends support for video conferencing through Hangouts and allows businesses to promote their brands and products through Google+ business pages.
Number of active users: 300 million approximately
20 - Instagram
Instagram was launched as a unique social networking platform that was completely based on sharing photos and videos in 2010.
After its launch in 2010, Instagram rapidly gained popularity, with one million registered users in two months, 10 million in a year, and 1 billion by May 2019.
In April 2012, Facebook acquired the service for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock.
This American photo sharing social networking app thus enables you to capture the best moments of your life, with your phone’s camera or any other camera, and convert them into works of art.
This is possible because Instagram allows you to apply multiple filters to your photos and you can easily post them to other popular social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. It is now part of the Facebook empire.
Instagram has expanded its feed with the launch of “suggested posts.” These posts, from accounts you don’t follow, will show up after you’ve reached the end of your feed and give you the option to keep scrolling with Instagram’s suggestions.
Up until recently, the feed has been entirely determined by users’ preferences and the people they follow.
Although praised for its influence, Instagram has been the subject of criticism, most notably for policy and interface changes, allegations of censorship, and illegal or improper content uploaded by users.
There is nothing really problematic about Instagram, but the main things parents worry about are typical of all social media: mean behavior among peers, inappropriate photos or videos that can hurt a teen's reputation or attract the wrong kind of attention, overuse, and of course, privacy.
Instagram recently released, Instagram Reels allowing users to create and edit 15-second video clips set to music.
Number of active users per month is over 800 million, also it has over 2 million advertisers every month and 60% of its users visit the platform daily.
