With Facebook, MySpace and Bebo defending their stats this month, traffic continues to soar for the leading travel and lifestyle social network

Social networks focusing on niche verticals such as travel are showing signs of bucking the declining trend, and are demonstrating continued growth and interest in the Web 2.0 space. WAYN.com, the world's largest travel and lifestyle focused social network have announced a 185% rise in unique visitors globally this month, reaching an expected 6.3m visitors, up from 2.2m the same time last year. A recent analysis conducted by Nielsen NetRatings also confirmed a 25% increase year on year in the UK alone. The site boasts over 11 million members in over 193 different countries and is growing by up to 15,000 new members every day.

Whilst other networks are seeing shortfalls in growth, it seems that having a niche focus has enabled WAYN to sidestep the decline that many of the leading generalist social networks have experienced recently.

Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen Online comments: "The last few months have seen a plateauing in the popularity of the larger, more general, social networks and 2008 looks to be the year when the ‘next big thing’ around the corner, or more appropriately, the 'next little thing' around the corner, will be the niche social networks. This is where we are likely to see the greatest growth - networks based on a particular lifestyle or interest, such as music, wealth, business or travel – the latter through sites like WAYN."

WAYN has seen a huge increase in growth and popularity in recent months, largely due to it opening up to the site to free interaction and introducing a number of new and innovative offerings, which have increased the stickiness of the site.

Jerome Touze, co-founder and co-CEO commented: "We’ve invested a lot of time and effort into improving our product offering in recent months and by listening to our members, we’ve introduced a number of useful travel tools and on-site benefits that have led to a huge increase in user generated content and community interaction. We opened the site to a free interaction model last year, and this has clearly proved to be a great success with 6.3m unique visitors expected for February 08, up from 2.2m this time last year."

With more offerings on the way, and travel remaining one of the webs most successful and in-demand verticals, the WAYN team is strongly positioned to further consolidate its position as the leader in the online travel community space. Ambition to internationalise products along with huge potential to monetise the offering is already bearing fruit, with an ever-growing list of partners vying to take advantage of a high value, targeted and hard-to-reach demographic.