Facebook accounts for over a seventh of the UK’s internet traffic
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According to internet monitoring firm Hitwise, visits to the increasingly popular social networking site have increased by 86.1% in the UK in the last year and now it accounts for 14.5% of all web traffic – far more than YouTube, eBay and even Google.
Google.co.uk remains the most visited site in the United Kingdom, but in terms of the number of clicks generated and over all traffic Facebook wins hands down. Google.co.uk comes in second with a significantly lower 5.8% and eBay is third with 5.5%.
"Because users view a much larger number of pages per visit, Facebook is the clear leader in terms of page views," said director of research for Experian Hitwise in the UK, Robin Goad. “During September, Facebook received more page views than Google UK, eBay UK and YouTube combined," he continued.
Twitter, which seems to have over shadowed Facebook in recent months, doesn’t even make the top ten. The reason for this has been speculated that many people access Twitter via dedicated clients rather than through the website itself which would decrease its internet traffic considerably.
"Although it has fallen somewhat off the media radar in favour of Twitter recently, Facebook remains far and away the most popular social networking website in the UK," claims Robin Goad.
"One significant factor is that the site’s growth in the UK doesn’t yet show any signs of slowing. A key measure of success for any social network is average session time; as we have seen with sites such as Friends Reunited and MySpace, when average session times begins to drop off visitor numbers soon follow.”
"Facebook has yet to experience this problem: its average visit time increased from 19 minutes 59 seconds in September 2008 to 26 minutes 14 seconds during September 2009."
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