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Facebook Overtakes Google But It’s A Close, Interesting Race

Facebook Overtakes Google But It’s A Close, Interesting Race

Facebook Vs GoogleFacebook has officially become the number one online destination among American’s according to a report released this week by web analytics monitoring firm comScore.

According to the report, Facebook users spent 41.1 million minutes on Facebook in August, while Google logged 39.8 million minutes. Yahoo came in third place, with a still decent 37.7 million minutes spent on site.

Google on the other hand can rest relieved, knowing they passed the 1 billion global users mark in that same month, making them the most popular search destination in the world.

Breaking down “time spent on-site” numbers, Informationweek says:

“Americans spent about 9.9% of their online time visiting Facebook, comScore said, vs. 9.6% of time on Google’s sites, including Gmail, Google search and YouTube. Web surfers in the United States spent approximately 9.1% of their Internet time visiting Yahoo properties”

It should however be noted that their is room for a margin of error considering comScore monitors just 2 million worldwide users and each websites’ servers to reach their number, however comScore is typically a trusted source for such statistcs.

The Facebook uptick in time spent on site comes just a few months (July) after they passed Yahoo as the number 2 destination.

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While the numbers are impressive, they still say nothing about the monetization efforts of Google vs. Facebook. For example, a whole lot of Google searches can be completed in that amount of time, whereas Facebook users spend their time between chatting with friends, playing social media games such as Farmville and performing various other tasks that keep them on the Facebook site, but not necessarily clicking on ads and generating immediate revenue for Facebook.

It would be interesting to see how the breakdown of time spent using each sites services contributes to the final number of users time spent using their websites.

One thing is for certain, since February Facebook has had a 10% uptick in the amount of time users spend on their site, reaching just over 7 hours a month. The average users on Google? 1.26 hours and on Yahoo? 2.29 hours. Google also receives an additional 1.02 hours spent on YouTube. Again, it should be noted that performing searches doesn’t take much time, but users may perform many searches in a one hour time period, lending themselves to more possible revenue for the search giant.

It will be interesting to see how the Google vs. Facebook battle ensues over the rest of 2010 with GoogleMe, the company’s new social media website expected to launch and Facebook adding more power to their location based “Places” service.

View Comments (3)
  • “According to the report, Facebook users spent 41.1 million minutes on Facebook in August, while Google logged 39.8 million hours. Yahoo came in third place, with a still decent 37.7 millions spent on site.”

    39.8 million hours is a lot more time than 41.1 million minutes. I’m not sure which of those is a typo since there were no units for Yahoo, but either the headline is wrong or the numbers are wrong…

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