Comscore have recently released their results of a study into the time spent online and engagement levels across top worldwide properties. The study shows some interesting results that might be surprising to some.
Comscore found that Microsoft sites, globally, commanded the most time spent on sites in Sep ‘09 at almost 15% , with Google sites at 9.3% and Yahoo sites at 6.3% . This does of course include Windows Messenger which would account for a large amount of time spent on Microsoft sites and is still a major player in the IM market. Unfortunately the study doesn’t take into account the fact that Messenger could be running idly in the background, so take these figures with a pinch of salt. Either way, Microsoft is also holding an impressive share of the total time spent online in Latin America and Middle East Africa, with 35.9% and 33.1% respectively.
While the above stats display a good insight into the top properties online, I think the findings for Facebook are a whole lot more interesting. Facebook often gets a little bit overshadowed by the social media site of the moment : Twitter. Yet Facebook is a massive player that is stealing a march on the traffic that’s been the reserve of the ‘big 3′ for years. The same study by Comscore showed that, although Facebook only accounts for 5.1% of the total time spent online, the total time is a 193% increase on September 2008. This is not something to be sniffed at and should show us that Facebook certainly means business and, more than ever, is the one to watch.
So why the big increase in traffic? Let’s put this in perspective by taking the fact that (using the figures above) people spent 316% more time on Yahoo sites than Facebook in Sep 2008 and that now this has dropped to just 22%. It wouldn’t be fair to attribute this rise to Facebook’s chat function, as that was introduced in April 2008. Their site traffic obviously explains the big increase. In September 2008 (according to compete.com) Facebook received 41,242,676 visits, compared to 124,579,479 in September 2009. A massive 202% increase. (This actually shows that visitors must be spending, on average, slightly less time on the site per visit which can perhaps be explained by our shortening attention spans online). I would suspect that Facebook Connect is also contributing to the healthy increase in time spent on the site and this could be central to the site’s bid for market share.
Facebook are clearly doing a lot of things right and just recently they have regularly been making headlines with improved or new functionality. More so than usual. In a market that is becoming increasingly competitive, Facebook is outperforming other social networking sites. The chart below shows site traffic for Facebook, Twitter and (just for the hell of it) Myspace
From August ‘09 – September ‘09 (click the image to see September stats) where both Myspace and Twitter lost traffic, Facebook increased visitors and is just now starting to follow a different path than other social sites. This trend has only recently started appearing and follows a 3 month period of stagnation for Facebook, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out. For now though, Facebook is certainly a force to be reckoned with.
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