July 6th, 2007
Facebook visitors up 89%
We probably didn’t need comScore’s latest findings to tell us that Facebook has seen massive growth since it first opened up the site beyond registered college students, but it does help to have the data to prove it. According to a comScore’s data, recording activity on the social networking site from May 06 to 07, unique visitors in the US grew by 89% to a total of 26.6 million per month. Raw page views grew to 15.8 billion, up 143 percent versus May 2006. Visitors averaged 186 minutes at the site in May 2007, which marked a 35-percent increase versus the same month last year.
So who are these new visitors? They’re primarily not 18-24 year olds, who inevitably made up the entire Facebook user-base prior to September 2006 — before the site opened its doors beyond college campuses. Instead Facebook’s user-base is beginning to resemble the Internet audience as a whole, with the most dramatic growth occurring among 25-34 year olds (up 181 percent), while 12-17 year olds grew 149 percent and those age 35 and older grew 98 percent. Facebook’s college-age user-base is still growing, up 38% but this was the smaller percentage growth of the three age groups.
Whilst these figures are impressive, on personal and anecdotal evidence they come as no surprise. I’m in the 25-34 age group (just) and I’m still getting weekly friend requests. What I think will be more interesting to know, is what effect Facebook’s new platform is having on this data — not only in terms of visits to the site but in particular with regards to stickiness and engagement. One theory would be that if you invite outside web services to set-up-shop inside of your site — essentially allowing the rest of the net to move in — the effect should be that visitors hang around for a lot longer.
Steve O'Hear is a London-based consultant, educator, and journalist, focussing on the Internet and all aspects of digital technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
