If Facebook isn’t already the largest website ever, it’s sure to get there soon. According to research company Hitwise, nearly one quarter of all U.S. Internet traffic went to Facebook during the week ending Nov. 13, 2010. The social network logged a 24.27 percent share of the Internet page views last week, 3.8 times YouTube’s 6.39 percent. Google ranked three with 5.32 percent, followed by Yahoo! search with 0.68 percent and Bing with 0.54 percent.
Facebook’s growth is up 60 percent from a Hitwise study from the same week one year ago. In overall visits, Facebook holds 10.28 percent of the Internet. This data goes hand-in-hand with a report last week that Facebook’s traffic has grown 55 percent since 2009.
(A “page view” is a single page load, while a “visit” is one sustained trip to a website and can include multiple page views.)
100 million downloads
In related news, GetJar, a smartphone app store for all platforms, announced that the Facebook application has been downloaded by 100 million people through its store. While this certainly proves that far more people use GetJar than we realized, it also shows just how successful Facebook has been at pushing mobile. If it has attained 100 million downloads on a third party store, one can imagine that downloads on the iTunes App Store, Android Market, and other official smartphone outlets might be much higher. Of note: more than 50 percent of the GetJar downloads came from Nokia phones.
“We’re proud to have helped bring the Facebook mobile experience to tens of millions of people regardless of their mobile platform, phone model or carrier,” said Patrick Mork, chief marketing officer for GetJar. “Global brands are realizing that although applications provide users with a rich and engaging experience, to make app distribution easy, they need to provide consumers with a single destination from which to get their apps instead of sending them off to multiple stores depending the type of handset they might have.”
Not bad. It would be interesting to see how Twitter is doing where it relates to traffic and app downloads.
