Facebook beats Yahoo into third place
Social network second most popular site in US, after Google
By Jon Brodkin | Network World US | Published: 10:05, 19 February 2010
Facebook is now the second most popular website in the United States, passing Yahoo with 133 million unique visitors in January, according to new research.
Yahoo lost the No. 1 spot to Google in February 2008, and now sits in third place, according to web analytics research by Compete.
"It's been two full years since we've seen a shakeup at the top, in February 2008, Google overtook Yahoo as number one, and never looked back," the research states. "Is Facebook's next conquest the Google traffic throne?"
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Facebook drew 133.6 million unique visitors in January, while Yahoo pulled in 132 million visitors. Google still leads the way with 147.8 million visitors, or nearly half the US population.
Facebook is king of the web when it comes to the amount of time people actually spend online, however.
"In January, 11.6% of all time spent online was spent on Facebook (compared to 4.25% for Yahoo and 4.1% for Google)," Compete says.
Twitter is also on the upswing, according to separate research released this week.
Twitter attracted 21.79 million unique visitors in January, an increase of 9% over the previous month, according to an article in Venture Beat. The traffic increase has mainly been driven by Google, which recently started posting Twitter status updates in search results.
