Facebook Users Favor Online News Sites
March 19, 2010
Internet users who click on links posted on Facebook that lead to news and media websites are more loyal to those portals than those coming from Google News, according to new data from Hitwise.
Among the most popular top 5 print media websites for the week ending March 6, 78 percent of Facebook users were returning visitors compared to 67 percent from Google news. The same was true for broadcast media, with 77 percent returning for Facebook compared to 64 percent for Google News.
Heather Hopkins, Senior Online Analyst, Hitwise, collected the numbers using clickstream data. The metric reports the percentage of visits by source (i.e. Google, Yahoo! Google News, Facebook, etc) that were new versus returning. New visitors are defined as those that haven't visited the site within the past 30 days.
"Interestingly, visitors from Google are less likely to be returning visitors than average for either Google News or Facebook," said Hopkins.
"This reinforces the long term value to News and Media organizations of working with the likes of Google News and Facebook."
Twitter Responsible For Very Little Visits To News and Media
March 19, 2010
The latest post from Hitwise discusses where users travel after leaving Twitter. The post further breaks down the various news and media sites which receive the greatest traffic from Twitter.
- Twitter.com accounted for 0.14% of upstream visits to News and Media sites last week. (Note that we are measuring website visits from Twitter.com only.) This compares to 3.64% from Facebook and 1.27% from Google News.
- Facebook was the #3 source of visits to News and Media websites last week. Google News was the #11 site and Twitter.com ranked #39.
- Upstream visits from Twitter.com to News and Media sites have grown by 54% over the past year.
Facebook Unseats Google As Most-Visited Site
March 17, 2010
Although the "thud" wasn't verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago. According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.
The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise). What's more, it doesn't look like Facebook's going to relinquish its lead anytime soon.
Heather Dougherty explained, "The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame."
Then here's one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: "Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week."
Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook. The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue. A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that's popular.
Nielsen Grants Bing Small Win Against Google
February 14, 2010
We heard earlier this week from comScore and Hitwise, and today, still more evidence that Bing performed well in January arrived. Nielsen has released its monthly report regarding the U.S. search market, and according to the firm, Bing managed to increase its market share by exactly 1.0 percent.
In December, Bing's market share was a slightly embarrassing 9.9 percent. But Nielsen indicated this afternoon that it's cracked the 10.0 mark, landing at 10.9 percent in January. Which isn't a bad achievement for a single month.
What makes Bing's accomplishment much more impressive is that Microsoft seems to have drawn searchers away from Google, too. On a month-to-month basis, Google's market share decreased from 67.3 percent to 66.3 percent, according to Nielsen.
Meanwhile, Yahoo gained just the tiniest bit of ground, inching up from a share of 14.4 percent to 14.5 percent.
As always, it'll be interesting to see if these changes are the start of any sort of trend, or just one-time adjustments. A big factor in how things play out this month will probably be how the search engines handle scores, medal counts, and athlete profiles relating to the Olympics.
