It’s true, Facebook.com is growing popularity, experiencing a boom in growth (73.27% over the last year as reported by Compete) and is surpassing Google.com in overall traffic (page views). The entire article is no more than one paragraph and a visual graph representing Facebook’s traffic compared with Google’s, of course with Facebook taking the lead just recently. Take a look…

Facebook reached an important milestone for the week ending March 13, 2010 and surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week. Facebook.com recently reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th. 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. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.

via Hitwise Intelligence – Heather Dougherty – North America.

Where is the real information here? I see yes, Facebook beats Google, great headline. But where is the story? Where are the facts? Experian Hitwise spoon feeds their data as a little teaser to get you on their website, but without more information this news doesn’t really provide the insight into what is happening recently with both Google and Facebook. There is no reason to get into specifics about business models and visitor types even, obviously this all takes a large part in these statistics, but Experian first of all should at least be providing more numbers and a little more explanation about the origin of this data (at least link to a data-sheet explaining the process for gathering these numbers). Even an experienced reader is likely to ask; What do these numbers mean exactly? Even today saying “Visits” to someone can be misleading. Even experts differ on opinion sometimes about the meaning of several website statistics terms; Visit / page view, visitor, unique visitor, hit… obviously this new field has some confusion about it that needs to be sorted out, also exhibited in the confusion over the term SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

I don’t expect every news article referencing web statistics to give a complete guide to online marketing in text (a link wouldn’t hurt) but there is a minimal amount of material required for any article to be considered anything more than simply smarmy sales technique. It’s understood that Experian would not want to publish anything referencing a competitor, especially when there is so much variation in website statistics from source to source and so much confusion in web analytics.

Take a look for yourself if you’re looking for real facts, you could spend your entire life studying the many stories behind just the last year of the growth of Facebook. Important facts are sometimes hidden between the lines in the graph, one of the many reasons I love to use Google Trends to see deeper into the popularity of anything. There are also many other sources of comparison data to the Hitwise statistics, I often use Alexa and Compete for a quick analysis of any large scale websites. If you look at any of these tools make sure you look around, viewing any one graph alone can be deceiving, make sure to see all of the statistics and you should quickly learn the following things; Facebook.com has been beating Google.com at keeping visitors on their site for a very long time now, Google.com still receives more unique visitors than Facebook.com, and finally, comparing Google.com to Facebook.com is like comparing Microsoft Word to Adobe Photoshop… Google.com began as a search engine although it has become the hub for a wide variety of personal and business internet tools (online documents, email, statistics, and more) and actually has separate pages appear for different countries (google.ca, google.cn, etc.). Facebook on the other hand began as a social network, they have been doing this longer than Google (orkut) and have always been ahead of them in market share for this field, not in any way competing with Google’s core products until recently.

Now we are at the best part, this is what the story should have been about (really this is what it’s about no matter how deep you look at it); Facebook is stealing a market, and that market is online advertising. Basically there are two things these two companies are focusing on; Acquiring large volumes of traffic (and keeping them engaged as long as possible), and learning as many useful details about the visitors as possible in order to build algorithms and software to perform the most accurate product-to-customer matching possible for business customer use. In case you didn’t know already, Facebook has not only gathered a lot of visitors and kept them online, but they keep track of a lot of great data about everyone (age, sex, location, etc.) and open it up for easy access to customers looking to place purchased advertisements.

In conclusion, Facebook is unique in how it requires users to log in to view most of the content and doesn’t offer first time visitors search or any other functions before creating an account and logging in. By creating a feeling of more privacy (and other practices) Facebook fosters more user growth than on most sites. Facebook has truly taken the idea of sharing software in the same way we share our other media (text, audio, images, and video) and the level of interactivity experienced by Facebook users is unlike that of Google in many ways.

Facebook remaining a closed system (in appearance and philosophy) and not offering a true content delivery network (as Blogger would foster public communication, Facebook fosters communication withing the FB social network), both helps and hurts it. Facebook can single out visitors more easily, a great thing for advertisers. How this hurts Facebook is in sharing, requiring API usage rather than using RSS syndication as a primary source of sharing information slows information and will lead to increased bottlenecks for Facebook and its users. The real bottleneck will be in managing the network, Facebook’s proprietary system requires more engineering time than does Google’s usage of existing and open standards which are managed primarily by third-parties and often by the community.

Being trapped in work recently I’ve only been keeping up with these services by using them and reading usage policies and other company provided documentation, but I’ve over-heard much of the chatter over Facebook’s advertising service and the better experience users are having with it compared to Google AdWords (if you wonder where Google makes money, see AdWords). I’m not going to compare these two services in any way which imposes the ideology that each are similar enough to group into the same Class. Facebook ads have emerged and grown rapidly in a market that is very much different than that of Google’s AdWords (and AdSense). I call these public and private online advertising, since the Facebook system is primary a closed login-based community any advertising placed there can be much more targeted than with Google AdWords, while AdWords will reach a wider audience.

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