14 DAY TRIAL // There's one company that should be fearing Facebook and that's Google, everyone else should have given up hoping to take on the social network by now.
The social network has its sights clearly set on displacing Google as the biggest company online. It's well on its way to do just that, but, in the meantime, it has easier targets to get to, one of them being Yahoo.
The web portal turned media company has been enjoying a solid third place worldwide when it comes to audience, ensuring it some healthy revenue and the luxury of figuring out what it wants to be.
But Facebook is gaining fast in terms of unique visitors and may very well overtake Yahoo to become the third largest site on the web by the end of the year and probably sooner.
Yahoo has about 620 million visitors, according to comScore's July numbers, enough to place it behind Google and Microsoft globally. But it hasn't seen any growth for a few months now and has stayed virtually flat for the past year.
By comparison, Facebook keeps on growing, by 50 percent in the past year in terms of unique visitors. It now gets about 570 million unique visitors each month, very close to Yahoo's numbers. And Facebook added 20 million new visitors in July alone, this while Yahoo stood still.
Note that the unique visitors doesn't translate into registered users. Facebook now officially says it has 500 million active users, but the strategy to open up more content to the web ensured that more people can visit the social network without actually registering.
With the current trend, which is very unlikely to change, Facebook should be taking the third spot very soon. And since Facebook's growth, while perhaps slowing down, is still very healthy, the social network will close in on its main target, Google, in the not so distant future.