Facebook traffic stats have amazed the search engine users in the week ending March 13, 2010, celebrated as Registered Dietitian Day in the US. The social networking king has surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week. According to the Hitwise stats chart: more than 400 million users, the average user spends 55 minutes a day on the site, 3 billion photo uploads per month.
Facebook.com recently topped the charts ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th. The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.
A recent Hitwise Report shows that Facebook is driving traffic to news and media sites, also its follow up data reveals that readers are more loyal to these sites and tend to come back for more, Googlers: not so much.
Its not about that Google is not performing well, as according to Hitwise, the search giant's numbers are up 9 percent as compared with the same week in 2009. It's just that Facebook's numbers are up 185 percent. This doesn't look like a Hitwise anomaly; data from Compete.com signifies the same trend, although a little less starkly.
Facebook has develop itself into a form which is equally enticing to the college and high school students and for the parents as well. It has enchanted tremendous people, who are falling under its spell of status updates, photo tagging, and gaming apps. Also Facebook has no other social network to seriously compete with, Google will have to guard against the surprisingly tenacious Bing.
Google is the most powerful force on web and traffic isn't everything for it. It is all because of the breadth of its offerings—search, advertising, maps, news, YouTube, Web apps, and so much more. Even Facebook technically don't have more visits or page views in its credit. Also Google is experimenting with gigabit Internet service, while Facebook is still figuring out its ad targeting.
But the point is still looming high on Google: with the vertigo-inducing effect of the chart above and Google's inexpert incursion onto Facebook's social-networking turf, Google's need be worried.
