Facebook slowly taking over the Internet

Ronny Kerr · February 8, 2011 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/16c9

Surpassing Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL for time spent by U.S. users, Facebook is clear winner

If you’re reading this, then it means I finally managed to pry my eyes away from Facebook. It’s not my fault, I’m just doing my part to contribute to the trend: Facebook usage is on the up and up.

Online data miner comScore released a sneak preview of its larger report to be released on Tuesday, and it illustrates beautifully Facebook’s continuing rise to dominance in the U.S.--not just for social sites, but for the entire Web. Last year was huge for the site, which by August 2010 had surpassed two of the biggest Web properties, Google sites and Yahoo sites, in terms of share of time spent.

Facebook now accounts for 11.1 percent of time spent online in the U.S, up from 5.5 percent a year ago. (Though, based on the graph, it looks a lot more like 12.1 percent to me.) Google looks like it has about a 10 percent share, Yahoo has about 9 percent (who says they’re a dying business?), Microsoft has about six percent and AOL has about four percent.

This is all pretty stellar for a private company doing nothing but building a social network. You don't even see Facebook advertise anywhere, which is ironic because advertisers love Facebook. The site's ad revenue is forecasted to top $4 billion this year internationally, or $2 billion in the U.S. alone.

Notably, comScore’s report only focuses on the U.S. market. While Facebook is indubitably making massive strides the world over (have they got those 600 million members yet or not?), there’s at least one country where the site is failing to make a splash: Japan.

As far as mobile social networking is concerned, Mixi Mobile was the leading destination in December 2010, capturing 11.3 percent of users. Next came Twitter with 6.7 percent and Gree with 6.5 percent. Facebook didn’t even make the graph.

But the situation in Japan might not look good for Facebook even beyond mobile.

The country “is one place where Facebook may not end up being dominant,” said Robert Goldberg, head of Zynga Japan, in an interview in Tokyo. “Despite the unique cultural challenges that Japan presents, we fully expect Facebook to be successful in this market as they have across the world.”