when it comes to page views, according to these numbers.
(Credit: Pingdom/Google Ad Planner)
Wow. Numbers crunched by traffic and uptime firm Pingdom indicate that
Facebook is absolutely crushing the rest of the social Web in terms of
monthly page views. With about 260 billion page views, the sprawling
social network's page view count is 11 times bigger than the
second-place entry, News Corp.-owned MySpace. It's also 59 times
higher than Twitter's, which comes in fourth. (Social network and
gaming site Hi5 is third; Friendster, which was recently sold to a
Malaysian tech company, is in fifth.)
These numbers are a testament to Facebook's phenomenal growth:
remember, as late as June 2008, MySpace was still bigger than Facebook
worldwide (and stayed bigger in the U.S. for several months more). And
Facebook, at the time, was largely unsearchable and protected behind a
log-in wall, keeping a damper on page views juiced by search engine
optimization (SEO).
The catch with Twitter's placement here, it should be said, is that
page views tend to be a very erroneous take on the microblogging
service's actual reach, because so many of its users access it through
third-party clients on both desktop and mobile devices, as well as
through text messages.
In social news, Digg pulls in twice as many page views as Conde
Nast-owned competitor Reddit (which is actually a smaller gap than I
would have expected), and seven times as many as nerd-news hub
Slashdot.
Here's what I find interesting: I wonder how much of this page view
dominance on Facebook's part was achieved when Facebook got the SEO
bump from letting users and brands' "fan pages" reserve unique URLs,
hence making the Web address of an individual Facebook page much more
search-result-friendly than a string of numbers. It's also potentially
driving more traffic indirectly through Facebook Connect, which lets
the users of 80,000 (and counting) third-party sites log in with their
Facebook credentials--in effect, spreading the Facebook brand all over
the Web.
Most importantly for page views, Facebook also has been gradually
encouraging members to make more profile content public, starting with
limited search-engine listings and then finally completely public
personal profiles in accordance with a new set of privacy controls
late last year.
TechCrunch writer Erick Schonfeld analyzed graphs from ComScore last
summer that showed unique visitors to Facebook versus Twitter, and
noted an uptick in Facebook's growth that coincided with the social
network's introduction of an option to make individual pieces of
shared content on profiles--status messages, links, videos,
etc.--wholly public.
Some of these shifts in privacy policies haven't gone over so smoothly
with privacy-conscious Facebook users. But if you look at traffic, the
"opening up" has been a massive boon for the ad-revenue-reliant
Facebook.