London — According to a report released by Experian Hitwise, indicates that for the first time ever Facebook trounced its biggest rival Google to become Britain’s most visited web page on Christmas Day, accounting for 10.50% of all UK Internet visits on that day.
Google.co.uk accounted for 9.77% of all UK visits, placing it slightly behind Facebook for that one day. Hitwise suggests that the social network will not maintain its position thanks largely to Google’s dominance of the search market in the UK. Nevertheless, this colossal clash used to be a non contest but the social network has risen to go head to head with the world’s biggest website and search engine.
Earlier this year the social networking giant Facebook, pursued Google to become the most visited website in America when it received 7.97 percent of all internet traffic compared to Google’s 7.03 percent.
The social networking website now crowned as the reigning king of social media on the internet, was launched only 6 years ago by a group of students at Harvard University, including multi-millionaire Mark Zuckerberg, who is now worth an estimated $ 6 billion. Facebook has about 400 million users around the world.
This heated battle will remain for many years to come, but the credit goes to Robin Goad for monitoring the situation, and he wrote, “As the chart below illustrates, on Christmas Day (December 25th) facebook.com accounted for 10.50% of all UK Internet visits, while the figure for google.co.uk was 9.77%.”
Goad further said, “This was the first time that Facebook has ever become the most popular UK website…”
Hitwise states the following reasons behind its attaining popularity:
- Facebook has a very similar share of the social networking markets in both the UK and US (51.9% and 51.3% respectively last week), but social networking is slight more popular in the US, so Facebook’s share of all Internet visits is higher in there.
- Google has a larger share of search market in the UK (over 90%) than in the US (just over 70%), and search engines as a category are also more popular on this side of the Atlantic.
The escalation in Facebook use would suggest that UK Internet users were more interested in connecting with their friends and family, updating them with stories of presents and how much food they ate. Google can expect an increase in searches in the coming days as people try to work out the best apps for their iPads or Android devices.
Moving forward, granted that the odds of Facebook staying ahead of Google are low; people will stop saying “Merry Christmas” to all their acquaintances before long, and they will have less spare time as they head back to work and school, too.
Still, becoming the most-visited site in the UK is obviously an important achievement for Facebook, which also now claims to be the world’s third largest website, recently knocking Yahoo from its position. It still lies quite a way behind Google and Microsoft but its seems like nothing can stop the social network at the moment.
Nevertheless, Hats’ Off to Facebook on both the milestone and handling all the traffic without issue.