Facebook bigger than Google… NOT!
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 8:05AMAccording to Hitwise, Google has been overtaken by Facebook in traffic of US Visitors, becoming the #1 site in the United States. This amazing figure was announced by Hitwise in a pretty release that among other things, got them exposure in all the major press organization and even the financial times. It’s amazing news: Less people go to Google than go to Facebook, meaning the entire world of Search Engines, the dominance of Google is over!!
However, what everyone failed to notice, and what Hitwise purposely ignored in order to get this fake research out is several important things, as far as I can tell:
1) As a good friend and industry expert pointed out: They purposely didn’t report Mobile. They blatantly ignored the entire mobile industry, making this almost useless.
2) This counted only people who visited the “homepage” of Google Search, ignoring all the services of Google including Google Maps.
3) They ignored all visits from browser toolbar (ie, searches that link to the page. I'm not sure how many people this actually is, but I would gather that toolbar searches make a significant part of Google traffic.
4) They point out how many hours people “Spend” on facebook, but not providing an actual basis of how these hours are counted. As many people do, I leave my facebook page open in the background but am not actively involved in facebook. When I go out to lunch, it’s still usually left open. On the other hand my google toolbar sits 24/7 on my browser, am I on Google 24/7?
What is the purpose of this? Hitwise is trying to find relevance in our industry, and purposely issuing press releases that manipulate numbers for the sole purpose of getting press. By excluding entire segments of Google users, while including ALL facebook users, they come up with what they wanted – a release that says that Google has been outpaced by Facebook.
What is even worse is that very few organizations called them out, especially on the mobile issue, or even questioned them. I’m pretty sure that there is some PR person over there trembling in her shoes worried that someone called them out. I am calling them out!
Thoughts?
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Reader Comments (5)
Interesting points. Some venture capitalists that I've recently spoken to also raised the 'idle page' argument about leaving their facebook tab open in their browsers. Although this is may true for social utility sites like facebook, twitter & myspace, the time spent on facebook is still staggering, as is their page views by comparison to others.
Page Views (11x #2)
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/01/05/facebook-twitter-myspace-page-views/
Time Spent (3x #2)
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/facebook-users-average-7-hrs-a-month-in-january-as-digital-universe-expands/
Time spent is a zero sum game, idle tab or not, facebook is dominating the landscape beyond belief at this point. Undoubtedly users keep a tab in their browser open for facebook, but their page views shows they're going back to it quite often throughout the day.
Your thoughts?
How is 'time spent' on a particular site relevant when ad networks actually want to monetize from the early-entry traffic? Sites that we run, we get quite a good number of members who actually spend more than 15-20 minutes on our site but by then all the ADS showing on our site for them disappears! WOW. Are these accountable only for huge social networks? This is working just as opposite for smaller and medium size sites!
I pointed out a little while back that sites like Compare and Hitwise were registering more hits for Facebook than Google: http://danbrenikov.tumblr.com/post/323112336/wow-looks-like-facebook-now-has-more-visits-than
From what I understand these analytics sites are recording direct visitors to Google.com and Facebook.com. People have to go to Facebook.com to login to Facebook, but as you say can use a toolbar search to get to Google. I would venture this is why Google's traffic is not growing in the same way as Facebook's, in this sense it is an unfair comparison.
I think it's fairly obvious that Facebook's "homepage" is more engaging and time consuming than Google's. The whole point of Google search and other Google services like maps, Gmail, etc are to get you to information quickly, so I wouldn't consider this a loss for Google.
I'm not sure the mobile argument is relevant really, m.facebook.com may not have overtaken m.google.com yet, but isn't this just a matter of time?
There seems to be a ton of data available to marketers today but very few people who know the right questions to ask about the data and recommend business strategies to support the latest data insights. Way too many companies are using Interns or entry level people to manage their online analytics at a time when they need as much information about their customers as possible. This is just an insanity that clearly shows people don't understand how, where and what of online analytics. Hitwise, at a minimum, should have included some disclaimers before issuing this report and now one has to wonder if in fact it was motivated by press rather than providing good sound business intelligence.
I really agree with the above comment, think the research is plain bullshit especially the way they interpreted the data. The only reason as I see it is the get some media attention towards facebook. Because really it is useless to publish research which is not statistically valid.
some writers are quite bad at interpreting statistics and data, easily making generalisations without proper statistic backup