Friday, July 17, 2009

Facebook Now the Internet’s Ultimate Time Waster

According to Nielsen Online’s June report on Internet usage, people now spend more time, on average, onFacebook than on the other 9 top web brands.

With 87 million visitors, which spent an average of 4 hours and 39 minutes on the site during the month, Facebook is first (out of the top ten web brands) when it comes to time spent and sixth when it comes to overall traffic in the US. It’s a huge deal; in a world where user attention is the ultimate currency, pageviews have been losing their importance and marketers are focusing on the time users spend on a site. But Facebook needn’t be worried about details; one can easily argue that, thanks to its phenomenal growth, it has the best of both worlds.

Put that together with Facebook’s careful strategy of turning content into ads, and you have the most powerful marketing platform in the world. True, Facebook is still not making as much money as it should be, but with everything going in its favor, results will come with time.

When it comes to time spent on site, Facebook is followed by May’s leader Yahoo, whose visitors spend an average of 3:15 hours on various Yahoo properties. AOL is third with 2:43 hours, followed by Google with 2:31 hours and Microsoft with 2:12 hours.