The ultra-popular social network Facebook has reached another milestone in its juggernaut-journey. According to rival Google’s Ad network Planner, Double-click, Facebook recorded 1 trillion page views and 870 million unique visits, in June.
Officially, Facebook has 750 million users and yet it saw 870 million unique visits. How is this possible, you may well ask. According to Digital Inspiration, the number comes from certain site sections like Facebook Pages and Profiles which are open to non-users as well as registered members. Every time a user clicks on anything in Facebook, they are contributing a page view, so flicking through photo galleries, liking pages, visiting friends’ profiles are all classed as page views. Each time a user did any of those things in June, they contributed to that trillion figure.
To try and put the trillion figure in perspective, as a mathematician said, “1 million seconds is about 11.5 days, 1 billion seconds is about 32 years while a trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years.”
In June, Facebook topped the 750 million-user mark and is continuing its climb to the 800 million users mark. According to Facebook, its users spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the social network and, on average, each user generates 1,150 page views a month, sharing more than 30 billion pieces of content including web links, news links, news stories, blogposts, photo albums etc. Compared to YouTube which had only only 126 views per unique visitor per month, these figures seem humongous.
YouTube and Yahoo follow Facebook with 790 million and 590 million unique visitors, respectively. Google’s Ad Planner Top 1000 Sites List, gives you a view of the largest 1000 sites, worldwide, based on unique visitors. The list is updated on a monthly basis as new Ad Planner datasets are released. However, Google has clarified that the list excludes adult sites, ad networks, domains that do not have publicly visible content or do not load properly.
Google, it is assumed for competitive reasons, does not share its own traffic related data or that of Gmail in the Ad Planner report.
Google’s own social network Google+ is growing but is still relatively small for it to be a part of this report.
In the meanwhile, Researcher Global Web Index compared Facebook usage in July 2009 to June 2011 and found that several Facebook activities, like virtual gifting, are on the decline. Such gifting fell 12.9% in the U.S. and 7.5% worldwide over that period. It reported that other activities that users do not seem to be favoring include messaging to friends which is down 14.8% in the US and 7.4% worldwide, joining a group which fell by 12.8% in the US and 6.5% worldwide. Not only are these activities falling faster in the US than any place else, but are also declining among the below-30 college-educated users in the US. The only significant increase in the Facebook activity which the report discovered was in uploading videos which was up 5% in the US and 7.6% worldwide.
Facebook dismissed the study with, “We do see stories about Facebook losing engagement in one region or another from time to time. Often, these conclusions are incorrect either because of the limited nature of the studies or because of seasonal factors, such as lesser people using the Internet during summer.”
Another researcher, eMarketer predicts that Facebook users in the US will grow by 13.4% this year as compared to 38.6% growth in 2010 and 90.3% rise in 2009. The primary growth for Facebook and Twitter is coming from Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia, stated the report.