As recently reported on the blog of our sister company Experian Hitwise, Facebook surpassed Google in the U.S. to become the most visited website during the week ending March 13, 2010. The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% during that week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits during the week ending March 13.
Experian Simmons DataStream found that while visitors to both Facebook and Google are making more frequent visits to each site in a given month today than they were two years prior, Facebook has seen its visitors’ average montly visit count rise at a much faster clip. As of February 8, 2010, Facebook visitors made an average of 11.7 visits to the site in the previous month, an increase of 21 percent compared to February 11, 2008 when Facebookers made only 9.6 visits to Facebook.com a month. During the same time, Google experienced only an 8 percent increase in the average number of visits its visitors made to Google.com each month. As of February 8, 2010, Google visitors made an average of 12.1 visits to Google.com in the previous month versus an average of 11.3 visits that Googlers made to the site in the month ending February 11, 2008. With momentum on its side, Facebook may soon exceed Google in both traffic and average monthly visits.
