14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is huge, the biggest social network and one of the largest websites on the planet. It's also growing at a hefty pace with no slowdown in sight. It has 300 million users worldwide and is one of the top five sites in terms of traffic in many countries. Yet, despite all this, some stats still manage to surprise us, like the fact that Facebook is now getting one in every four pageviews in the US. That's right, a quarter of the webpages served in the US come from Facebook, quite a feat for a company that, a year ago, wasn't even a threat to the then-dominant social network, MySpace.
Looking at numbers from Compete, researcher Perry Drake found that Facebook had grown to be the biggest website in the US in terms of pageviews, trumping giants like Google. While Facebook manages to get 25 percent of the page views, Google only gets about eight percent of the total monthly pageviews in the US, or one in 12. The numbers, of course, may not be precisely accurate, but they do serve as a good guideline.
Only traffic to Google's homepage at google.com and related sub-sites is counted, leaving out some properties that are hosted under their own URL, but this is still an impressive feat for Facebook and probably a cause for worry for Google. Facebook's dominance doesn't translate into the number of total visits where Google still has the upper hand, but the social network is closing fast. The discrepancy between visits and pageviews is easy enough to explain, users tend to spend a lot more time at Facebook and to navigate through a lot more pages, whereas at Google users tend to stay in one place to get the job done.
But the biggest worry for Google may be in the number of unique visitors where Facebook is again catching up. The social network is over 90 million unique visitors in the US at the moment and the number is still rising. These stats may be a bit surprising at first, but only because Facebook has grown so fast in the past year, while Google has been dominating the landscape for several years now. Everyone is looking at the search-engine brawl or the battle between social networks, but there is just one real war on the horizon and it's going to be between Facebook and Google.