As Facebook Inc. filed for its initial-public-offering last week, now is the perfect time to examine the website’s performance online and how its audience compares with that of other social networks. Given the expected $75 billion to $100 billion initial valuation, we’re all already aware of the magnitude of the business – below we reveal how much of a behemoth the website itself is in the US and other markets.
- Facebook.com captures one in every eleven Internet visits in the US.
- 1 in every 5 page views occurs on Facebook.com.
- The average visit time on Facebook.com is 20 minutes.
- Facebook.com’s audience skews slightly more female than the online population as a whole.
- The ages of Facebook.com visitors are indicative of the website’s strength in the marketplace, with relative parity in distribution of its visit share by age vs. the online population.
- Facebook.com under-indexes in visit share from the most affluent income group. With that said, Facebook’s size more than makes up the difference; the site wins 499,949,430 visits from the most affluent income group versus YouTube’s 223,732,591 visits and Twitter’s 15,166,795 visits.
- Facebook.com became the #1 ranked website in the US on March 9, 2010.
- “Facebook” is the most searched term in the US and Facebook-related terms account for 14% of the top search clicks.
- Facebook.com users are highly loyal to the website; 96% of visitors to Facebook.com were returning visitors in January 2012.
- Internationally, Facebook.com ranks in the top two websites in every market except China, where Sina Weibo, Baidu Zhidao and Renren are the dominant social networks.Facebook.com’s largest footprint is in Canada, capturing almost 12% of all visits in that market. It also recently surpassed Orkut, placing it behind only Google Brazil in market share.
Facebook.com is the largest website in the US and a top performer in numerous international markets. The fan base of the site is loyal and spends a significant portion of their time online on the social network. Facebook’s influence is seen in the presidential elections, digital shopping habits and beyond.
Thanks to Margot Bonner, Analyst on the Strategic Services team for today’s analysis.