Facebook Overtakes Google in US Web Traffic

Facebook Tops Google in Web Traffic

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Last week, Facebook hit a huge milestone, becoming the most-visited site in the USA. This means that Facebook beat Google in web traffic.  According to Hitwise's Heather Dougherty, Google and Facebook made up for a combined total of 14% of all of last week's US pageloads. Considering just how many viable sites there are across the web (not counting the blogs about people's cats), 14% is a very large number.

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Facebook had already claimed one-day victories for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Day 2009. This stands to reason, as Facebook users want to pop online to wish each other Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, as well as to brag about the stuff they got under the tree. On New Year's Day, users would be posting potentially-embarrassing photos of their friends, as per web tradition. 

This is big news for Facebook, which continues to flirt with an IPO: great traffic never hurt anyone in the dot com world. Also, Facebook was quick to embrace the rapidly-expanding smartphone market, with dedicated apps for Android, Blackberry and iPhone that bypass traditional browsers entirely.

What the Hitwise article does not address, however, is if last week's numbers count the use of Google's browser toolbars, or if only the Google landing pages are counted in the event that a user initiates a Google search from outside the Google web property.

Depending on how these numbers are recorded, expect to see that overall percentage of web traffic grow, mainly due to the aforementioned growth of web-friendly mobile devices. This also means Myspace is on the way out, at least in terms of forward growth. A quick look at Quantcast verifies that, while Facebook continues to grow, Myspace traffic continues to drop. This drop isn't steep, but it's consistent, and over the past few months the gap has been looking insurmountable.

On Facebook's part, though, this means that more eyes are on their notoriously shaky functionality- when was the last time you were able to use four different Facebook functions, and have them all work?