The latest statistics from internet analysts Hitwise show that in the past week, Facebook received 3% more visits and five times as many page views as Google.com, Google’s US site.
According to Hitwise’s data, this makes Facebook the most popular site in the US, accounting for 25% of all page views.
comScore’s numbers differ, but are no less impressive. According to them, the social media site has grown 55% in the last year in the US, based on the number of unique visitors. October 2009 saw 97.37 million users go to the site, while October 2010 saw that number jump to 151.13 million. Globally, Facebook has over 500 million users.
At the Web 2.0 conference recently held in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that half of all US Facebook users visit the site every day.
In the past year, Facebook has completely eclipsed MySpace and has also outpaced Twitter’s 30% growth over the period. Only Google remains to be beaten – comScore puts it at 173.3 million unique US visitors.
Neither of these figures, however, take into account Facebook’s vast mobile user-base which accesses the site through the Facebook application common to today’s smartphone platforms.
A slew of new product releases this year, including Places, Groups and Messages have also propelled Facebook to become one of the most valuable internet companies around.
Facebook has also been challenging Google’s online advertising dominance. It now serves more display ads on its site than any other.
