Facebook Attracts 1 of 4 U.S. Page Views

Recently, Facebook for the first time accounted for one in four page views in the U.S. for a week, or 25%. This statistic is up from 16.7% for the same period one year ago. Facebook, which has grown sixty percent from one year ago, logged ten out of each hundred United States Internet visits, compared to Google at seven percent of U.S. visits.

The page views for Facebook were nearly four times the views of YouTube, which was the number two destination, and five times the page views of Google. This is not all that surprising for industry experts, but the ramifications of other statistics are huge.

Facebook leads the Internet in online time of engagement, and in August of 2010, web users in the United States spent over forty million minutes on the Facebook site, compared to less than forty million minutes on all the websites affiliated with Google.

Google has been the top destination for years in page views, traffic and minutes spent online, and these statistics are buoyed by its search engine and email platform, as well as the ever-popular YouTube video-sharing site.

The rise of Facebook may eventually make it the highest target for advertisers that seek a larger audience online, taking advantage of Facebook's 500 million users. A worse statistic for Google is that Facebook Connect and their social plug-ins help it to extend its lengthy tendrils well outside the garden of Facebook.com.

Facebook doesn't have any third-party ad platforms comparable to Google's AdSense, and Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, didn't indicate that any are coming at the Web 2.0 Summit. But still, once can't help but see the brand saturation. This is a problem for Google, which wishes to counter Facebook's success by adding social layering on its properties.

Google is taking steps to address the local ad and search market, and has launched Google Tags and Google Places, a Boost SMB platform for ads and Place Search. But there isn't any social glue that connects those sites, to keep users there for a longer time than it takes to check for business reviews or directional look-ups. Google needs a way to keep people coming back to their sites. Facebook has this built-in, since people visit with their friends and family on Facebook, often on a daily basis.

The market share of total page views for Facebook was nearly four times the second-ranked YouTube recently, and experts recognize that Facebook is on its way to be the top of all internet sites on a more regular basis.