14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is without a doubt one of the most popular sites online at the moment; yet, it continues to grow at an increasing rate even as it enters a very select crowd of just a handful of sites with comparable audiences. The latest US numbers from comScore show that Facebook has managed to get pass the 100 million unique visitors in the US last month and that the social network's growth shows no sign of stopping.
The analytics firm also moved Facebook up a place in its top of the biggest online proprieties in the US, now becoming the fourth largest site in the country after just Google sites, Yahoo sites and Microsoft sites. This is the highest ranking position the site has held in comScore's top and it also means that AOL sites now slip to the fifth place.
Facebook managed to attract 102.9 million unique visitors in the US in November, from 97.4 million in the previous month, a 5.6 percent jump. AOL, on the other hand, managed just 99.7 million visitors last month, an actual increase in audience as it gained almost 1 million new visitors, but nothing like Facebook's continued rise.
The growth is even more impressive when you take into account the fact that last year Facebook's audience was half the size it is now, with 50.5 million unique visitors in November 2008. At the same time, AOL lost 8 percent of its audience in the last year.
Facebook's apparent competitors in the social networking market aren't doing great either. MySpace is continuing its downwards trend with yet another month of shrinking user numbers, though it's a very small decrease of less than 400,000 users dropping from 64 million. Twitter is faring slightly better, seeing some growth, but going from 19.2 million to 19.4 million unique visitors can hardly be called a huge win.
