14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook keeps on growing, with no signs of stopping or slowing down, and, at this point, there really isn't any indication of how big it could get, as it's already much, much bigger than anything before it. And, despite attention-grabbing headlines proclaiming that users are beginning to leave the social network in mass, new numbers from Nielsen show that it is, in fact, the most popular online destination in the US, with users spending five hours and 12 minutes on the site in July.
It's not only the most popular, as it also enjoys a solid lead, with the runner-up Yahoo only managing to hold users' attention for three hours and 23 minutes. The rest of the pack is even further behind, but more closely packed, as users spent, on average, two hours and 36 minutes on AOL, followed by Fox Interactive Media (MySpace) with two hours and 19 minutes and Microsoft's MSN with two hours and eight minutes.
But the most impressive figure is how much Facebook has grown, as, in just one year, the site has increased its hold on its audience from one hour and 30 minutes to more than the five hours it enjoys today. The spectacular growth can be explained by the fact that users simply have more to do on the site and, because many more of their friends are using it as well now thanks to the big growth in user numbers, they spend more time engaging with their peers.
"A couple [of] years ago, about half of our users logged onto Facebook every day, and as we've grown to 250 million worldwide users, that number hasn't changed," Mike Murphy, vice president of global sales at Facebook, told Advertising Age. "It makes it more engaging from a user standpoint and we get more minutes spent, which means we have more opportunities to show more people an ad message in a given day."