Top Uruguayan Websites by Traffic

A study was done on Uruguayan internet usage which found that %44 of the population is online. The most popular use of the net in uruguay is email. That kind of goes without saying.

Read about the study in Castellano or a summary in English.

What’s interesting is social networking. The top social networking site, coming in at 4th most popular in terms of traffic is fotolog.net. I’ve know that my uruguayan friends are really excited about and use fotolog a lot. I personally used it until i found flickr and never looked back. What it tells me is that social network site needs enough tech to work, but really what decides success or failure are the thought leaders and cultivation of an active community. The second most popular social networking site is essentially a clone of fotolog, metroflog.

Third is blogger, which we all know, and forth is Taringa which i’ve never seen before, but appears to be kind of similar to livejournal. It’s the only one of the top 4 which seems to have an interface which has a default interface in spanish.The other three all became major players without a Spanish language interface. It really isn’t about the design, or tech, it’s about the people and their real social networks. Trainga has one big advantage which has helped it grow. It’s got a digg like interface and they are lax about people digging the locations of warez and other pirated materials.

There is no ebay on the list, ebay chose to block uruguayans from using their site, i’m not sure why, some legal reason maybe? But that created space for MercadoLibre to rise up in it’s place. Google has three sites in the top 10, google uruguay, google.com, and google spain. Yahoo doesn’t fare so well in this market, coming in 7th, despite there being a local yahoo sales and marketing office just across the river in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

One interesting note, there is a US social networking site which is growing quickly, %270 in the last year. It’s facebook.