The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide. It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below). Facebook itself only officially acknowledges 250 million active registered users (but you don’t have to be a registered user to visit some Facebook pages).
In the past year, it has grown 157 percent, gaining 208 million visitors. It long ago passed its rival MySpace on a global basis, way back in April, 2008. Since then, it has passing even bigger sites on its way up. In the chart above, the blue line is Facebook. It passed Amazon back in August, 2008. eBay fell by the wayside in January, 2009. It surged past AOL sometime in February, 2009, and just last month it finally passed the Wikimedia Foundation sites (which includes Wikipedia).
So there it stands at No. 4. It will be a while, if ever, before it catches up to the three world leaders: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. They each have between 240 million and 500 million more monthly global unique visitors than Facebook (see chart below). But it’s always good for a company to have stretch goals.
Worldwide unique visitors (June, 2009). Source: comScore
- Google Sites: 844 million
- Microsoft Sites: 691 million
- Yahoo! Sites: 581 million
- Facebook: 340 million
- Wikimedia Foundation sites: 303 million
- AOL: 280 million
- eBay: 233 million
- CBS Interactive: 186 million
- Amazon: 183 million
- Ask Network: 174 million
In the U.S., Facebook had 77 million unique visitors in the month of June, making it the sixth largest site in the U.S. (after Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and all Fox Interactive Media sites combined).
Facebook can climb up to 2nd spot. They can’t overtake Google
Facebook rocks!!!
Google is the king of the ring…
The king of the ring? For now, yes, but the technology advances quickly one startup out there would knock out Google some day. I bet Facebook would.
That’s what they said about far too many other companies that have since died.
Jon
Except for that whole making money thing that they still haven’t figured out.
Facebook is making tons of money… you just don’t know about it
And you know this because you are a super Facebook insider who spends time writing comments on web sites.
Owned!
It’s a private company. Outsiders are unaware of Facebook’s profitability. I’m sure they are making money though. People were saying the same things about Google before they went public. If an IPO comes, you would be stupid NOT to invest. Their real value is their potential to build a business model around the well structured data we’ve all given to them.
Facebook is making money:
http://www.busi...schedule-2009-9
PWNED!!!!
maybe Microsoft will buy up Facebook and the combine unique visitors will be more than Google.
I partially agree with you. They cannot overtake Google’s place. And since facebook is only a social network, and providing no information; it is also difficult for them to take over other websites’ places…
haha…are you joking?
Dang… Facebook beats Wikipedia?? What’s up with that!?
It makes sense; I’m more interested by what’s going on in my direct social circle than in directory information because my social circle will directly affect me faster and more powerfully more often than will impersonal data.
I totally agree & think this is why facebook has grown exponentially.
Great article!
Thanks!
I bet you prefer to go to a party than finish your home work
except teachers won’t accept wikipedia articles as a valid source for papers.
That’s why I always use Facebook as a reference on my essays instead.
Any sane person would rather party than finish homework… If you rely on wikipedia for your information then you are asking for trouble.
Live life, don’t research it!
Any sane person would rather party than finish homework… If you rely on wikipedia for your information then you are asking for trouble.
Live life, don’t research it!
it’s not like they are competitors or sth. I ‘d also like to see if facebook affected the total time people spend online – and the number of people who just became frequent internet users because of facebook.
I agree with tenthings. I believe facebook is changing people’s habits. Social lifestreaming is changing the way lots of people relate to the web. In the future it could be facebook or other new technologies but social lifestreaming is here to stay.
This is amazing on so many levels. The three sites above it—Google, Microsoft and Yahoo—have been along for much, much longer and have tons of site. Facebook has only been around for about 5 years and has 1 website.
Yay Facebook!
Google sites means all GOOG proprieties or just search engine?
I think all GOOG sites including Docs, Gmail, Maps etc.
It includes everything that Google operates including things like YouTube and Picaso. Also, they have a lot or regional domains which are counted too.
Yes – ComScore goes by site owner, whereas Alexa ranks actual domain names.
FB is on its way to take over the world. Let’s see for how long it lasts.
What about YouTube?
Google owns YouTube, right? I’d assume that YouTube is then considered a Google site.
YouTube is a Google property and would be included in its totals.
That’s very interesting. Also that the second largest search engine is also YouTube.
The social web continues to take center of the mainstream web as it normalizes.
I’m collecting other useful stats about social networks here: (myspace, facebook, twitter) etc
I’ll be sure to add this blog post as well
http://www.web-...stats-for-2009/
Don’t you mean ‘most visited’ rather than largest?
Largest to me means number of pages or amount of content though maybe this is redundant nowadays.
That’s what I was thinking. “Large” refers to size, rather than amount of visitors/customers.
Though this phrase is used this way in business pretty often. “The largest business in (my town)…” could refer to the company with the most sales, the company with the most employees, or the company with the most real estate. So it can go either way these days.
Wow, surprised Ask is in the top 10. I worked there during the dotcom boom and never thought it would last.
“Facebook Is Now the Fourth Largest Site In The World”
Yup, time to change that.
Monopolies are NEVER a good thing.
Being large doesn’t make them a monopoly.
800M UNIQUE visitors?? thats a JOKE !! you have 6B ppl living in this planet, 1B starving (not mention access to the internet), 2B in China that cant use much of an internet at all, out of 3B left you have probably about 1B of children, so it comes that EVERYONE regardless age is using Google, Yahoo, Msft and Facebook.
Let me tell you something about “unique” visitors. I browse the web from 3 PCs at my house, and 2 at my work. This all comes to 5 UNIQUE visitors.
Thus, this number will always be irrevelant.
i agree..
i’d also like to know if they are adding all the uniques among each property, or are they filitering duplicates?
either way it means nothing since facebook isn’t profitable.
The numbers are relevant when comparing one site to another in terms of gross traffic. Meaning… the same decay factors for actual “unique” users applies to all the sites being compared.
Just my 2cents, but then again I do only have one computer.
except that you’re behind 1 IP from your router, so you are 1 visitor…
China’s population is around 1.4B and in terms of its Internet users it will soon overtake the US my friend
i believe that happened a few months ago.
Exactly, besides Facebooty, Tittser, Doggy – dearly beloved social media, has not earned a dime to their shady Eastern European or South East Asian “investors” nor has it really affected the quality of life for the better – only thing it has done is make people be more addicted to second rate news sources like bad actors, mainstream media and everything else that dumbs them down – makes men feminine and women simply boring b”"es – it is the opposite of the real revolution that is coming in the internet. I use Facebook for my friends and it is the worst way to communicate with them – unsincere and not pleasurable. I used to use digg daily and I have to say it is a very camp news source all that fake love for Ron Paul included. I tried Twitter and it is only for middle aged men who go around pretending to be young and I do not know what. Compared to this – email is just good old fun.
These are my personal stories as a “cuntsumer” or consumer, I am having no more of this as of today midnight I am stoping adding all of this crap to my lifestyle.
I know I sound like a crumpy social conservative/idiot but actually I am a very liberal, attractive soul yeah, yeah got my gay friends, a few black friends, got the interesting, nice bi-curious women in my life support drug legal, gay marriage, non-religious, web ui provider – I should be the target audience for these products but just that these services fail on their promises. Why does no one hold them accountable? I know I will hold ´em by my own free will, I shall.
Shall the Divine listen to me and give some really good material on the web? Maybe I will start my own product? Anyhow, Ciao – the current web is not social (not your friendly threesome or foursome hook up service) nor civilized (for interesting ananymous discussions about sciense, travel, design, quality of life) – this needs to change, pronto. Just a unregular, unordinary liberal thinking out loud.
thanks for reminding me that i use a lot fo computers at my local library to access these sites, along with the computers at work, at school, at home…man…i spend a lot of time online and all on different computers. shoot.
how do they consider a unique viewer? i no longer have a facebook account and i lurk facebook, twitter, and lots of other sites so i guess my clicks count.
One IP = One Visitor
Do you have a chart that shows revenue per visitor for the top ten web properties?
This is pretty skewed in favor of google, microsoft, and yahoo considering all three have several different sites combined to make these numbers. If facebook had just one of the other websites (i.e. youtube) to combine with its current numbers it would probably be ranked higher.
Would be interesting to see the breakdown of individual website traffic for the top three.
Facebook is definitely going to be Number two soon enough, but to take Google…. might just remain a dream
I’m surprised that CBS Interactive is so high, even considering all the properties they own: http://www.cbs.com/sales/.
I, too, am surprised about Ask.com. Does anyone actually use that site regularly? (That’s more of a rhetorical question.)
yeah…used to go to ask jeeves…and now if i go google something the top sites are usually yahoo answers, ask, ehow, about, uhm and another site i’m forgetting, it’s a wiki site…i think wikianswers, but anything wiki is usually page 1.
So if Google removes Facebook.com listings from it’s indexing service, what happens to Facebook unique monthly views?
Search engines control the world.
Facebook gets far less of its traffic from search engines than most sites. The only significance would be people who type “facebook” into Google rather than facebook.com in their address bar.
Facebook could have a bigger impact by putting a Bing search box on the top of its page.
i purposely rarely ever use my address bar. i just google or soe everything.
This raises an interesting point.
Twitter (not in this list at all) is always getting a ton of coverage. I love the coverage but for some reason we never here anything about Ask, CBS Interactive, Ebay and very little about Amazon.
I would imagine that the top 10 web sites would be standard for coverage above small sites like Twitter & Digg.
While I hate all the coverage of Twitter this site does cover start ups. The ones you have listed long since passed that phase.
I wonder how many of those Microsoft visits are just Windows doing random stuff…because if that is the case they will rule for a long time.
Some leaked Windows code:
//LOL LETS INFLATE MICROSOFT STATS FOR FUN!!11
while(true) {
wget(”http://microsoft.com”);
sleep(10000);
}
LOL, Microsoft is using Linux now?
Ever since they started the limit on how many regional networks you can join, I have made up about a dozen accounts. Before the regional networks I only had my one university account. I travel a lot so the regional networks are fun, but just too limited by only allowing 2 every 60 days.
On the other hand, applications, photos, status updates, and videos are like separate sites on facebook so it is really more than just one site!
Congrats to Facebook.
Really wonderful site so attracting people by giving them more functionally.
Hehe community overtook science. Pretty interesting thing.
Great news. I’m just here to chime in on a little pattern I’ve noticed around the commenting grounds lately:
Why is it that whenever traffic numbers are brought up for gandering, people get skeptical and, in some instances, start “hating” on the company’s numbers? Doesn’t even matter the company. There’s always those 2-3 people who say “Well how much of these visitors actually own accounts? How much revenue are these companies seeing from this traffic?” as if that data makes these statistics any less relevant.
You cannot measure success on the web similarly to success at, say, a storefront. There is a concrete way to track every individual purchase at that store. On the web, the success of certain properties must be determined by many different factors. Just as in the real world, global annual revenue and the amount of storefronts might measure a business’s success, the internet has to take into account several factors as well.
For one, unique traffic is the biggest (especially for a monetized solution). Noone cares about how much of the users pouring into the site actually have accounts, the money is all the same when they see any ads on that front page (except for facebook, who has ads everywhere except for the front page (without signing in, of course)).
It is also hard to measure success by number of uniques vs number of accounts. You first have to categorize the sites in question, and compare not only their traffic, but their percentage of actual accounts. This is stretching it just a bit, but is still another effective way of determining success against your competitors. Still, it is not enough to compare Facebook’s percentage of accounts per unique visitors as opposed to Google and Yahoo (because although both other services offer features of social networking, Facebook is niche in regards to Google and Yahoo offering so much more.)
Finally, some of you have taken it too far when trying to see how many of the user accounts are actually active. At this point, it just sounds like you are hacking away at whatever negative degree of the success that said company has. It becomes sad, and irrelevant to the point where it becomes a waste of time (that is, of course, if you don’t own stock in any of these companies and/or are employed by them).
In short, please stop being haters. That is all.
in a good ole jamaican saying “DEM BAD MIND”! meaning they are just jealous! so thats why they are hating….
ahh these numbers are and always have been inflated. As a marketer you have to consider that twitter well could be only 1-3 million “real people” with 4 or 5 accounts. Take Ask for example those numbers likely include all Interactive Media Props ie: Mr Barry Diller. So actually unless I’m selling tickets, realestate and mortagages they are likely not a company I want to seriously consider putting ads on. IMO… like all things techcrunch. Facts sometimes just get in the way of the story.
I still see even in these comments the bias here is towards google. Its silly. Oh they might get to number 2 but never beat google blah blah blah
Google supporters are big time lobbyists. They always shout loud.
FB is obviously a great social platform and will surely never stop growing.
There is a post about Twitter reaching the 44.5M visitors in June.
FB is twitter’s stretch goal!!! :O)
@Xavi_is_here
What I don’t understand is why Baidu.com is not there, they have more traffic than google???
also comparing one social networking site to every single thing google owns is crazy… it’s pretty damn impressive how fast that site is growing… maybe its Skynet in disguise
are you all sure http://www.cryptguardian.com isn’t number 1? oops shameless plug
whats next…..
Isn’t Facebook THE largest single site on the Web? Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are each a conglomerate of sites. Pick any single Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo site, and it will pale in numbers compared to Facebook – with possibly Google.com being the exception?
Would like to see site-by-site comparisons.
youtube..
Google uses google.com for many other uses such as google reader. So as to fool traffic measuring companies. So the site google.com itself is many sites together.
With all the x number of traffic are they making enough money to survive their own till 2011? 700+ million VC money, lots of traffic and the only problem is? unlike GOOG or a YAHOO! the pages are mostly private and shared in a network based on friends. So the ad revenue is lower than the top guys.
Twitter with all that traffic make good money some day. They will play with the real time stuffs and integrating related tweet-sense they will break even. I seriously doubt if facebook ever break even.
It’s a good thing nobody cares what you think.
Any idea where twitter lies?
I thought Facebook was above Yahoo traffic… Thts strange…
Social media is where it’s at. They need to work on how they communicate with the users at bit more.
what’s yahoo ?
cbs interactive?? Really?
Surprising Facebook continues to grow… It has a policy of disabling accounts without warning, customer service is crap, security is a major concern, advertising policies are questionable.
They either need to grow up really fast, or they are just going to be a one-hit-wonder.
Long on Face, Short on Fiction – My Experience on Facebook and Why I’ve Quit:
http://maximumf...-short-on-book/
does anyone have any idea how and when will the finally make a profit?
do they assume that in 5 years from now facebook users will spend more money online than now? what about adverts clicks??
people go to google to search — if they search for products, they may click paid links.
people go to facebook to socialize, last thing to do is to click in advs.
I believe that Facebook could make shitloads right now if they sold products directly to users and didn’t fixate on advertising. They’ve dabbled in virtual goods and a few other things, but the key to making real dough is actually selling something. And they have to start soon and just assume that they’ll have a never ending cushion of cash. They’ve received so much money that they’ve probably priced themselves out of an acquisition.
*meant, “NOT just assume”
Doesn’t Fox Interactive Media make the top 10?
Unless they find a real way to make money this trend will stop as no one will want to part of a orginisation of this size and the required up keep unless there is a better revune source.
The power of entropy.
The comments about Fb not making money are weird – and simply false. FB has made money, lots, and lots of it. VC money is money – goes straight to the P&L statement.
Making money out of users is a given. Back in the day a lot of people made these same comments about Amazon – they are strangely silent these days.
I say it passes Yahoo! but then settles in the number #3 position. It will be very hard for Facebook to pass the top two search engines. Especially now that Yahoo has given its search to Bing.
What exactly does the Ask network include according to Comscore? is it every site that IAC owns, so Ask.com, Bloglines, CitySearch, Evite, Excite, InsiderPages, iWon, My Fun Cards, My Way, Popular Screensaver, Smiley Central, Match.com, chemistry.com, CollegeHumor etc. etc.
And if it is, my question would be, is Comscore lumping paypal traffic into ebay traffic since ebay owns paypal?
Congratulations facebook. Watch out google.
I can’t believe so many people have signed up. I don’t have time to visit them often.
It’s good that facebook is forth largest site in the world. Facebook monthly active users are increasing day by day.
Wow, Man its really great thats Facebook have chase other popular website too. Facebook no doubt is fastest growing Social Networking website. Great info. Thanks for update
How on Earth is AOL still up there? Some people can’t take a hint.
i’m not surprised by that list.
good for fb…but even better for some of the other sites to even keep their numbers considering how theire site designs suck.
i still don’t have fb or twitter and i can’t be convinced to get one. i might get a linkdin in the future, but i doubt it.
It is funny all this great press as they had money invested and looking to go public. Did you hear that our military is shutting down use of Facebook and Twitter .