New Facebook Statistics Show Big Increase in Content Sharing, Local Business Pages
How much traffic does Facebook now send to other web sites? Analytics firm Compete tells the San Francisco Chronicle that 13 percent of US traffic to big web portals — Yahoo, MSN, AOL …
Context & Ripple Effects
The 13 percent figure from Compete, reported via the San Francisco Chronicle, extends an arc that started with comScore's July 2007 finding of a flood of new traffic hitting Facebook — except the direction has reversed: Facebook is now measured as a sender of traffic to the big portals (Yahoo, MSN, AOL), not just a receiver. Nielsen's companion datapoint that US users averaged more than seven hours a month on Facebook in January frames why: attention is pooling inside the network long enough to spill outbound.
The second half of the story — surging content sharing and growth in local business Pages — matters because it identifies what is being shared: not just media links but commercial presences. That follows Silicon Alley Insider's May 2009 catalog of the sites riding Twitter's traffic explosion, which established social referral traffic as a metric publishers and merchants now track competitively.
First-order effects
- Yahoo, MSN, and AOL now have a measurable non-search rival for their inbound traffic: at 13 percent of US portal visits, Facebook's referral stream is large enough that portal homepages are no longer the default entry point they once were for a meaningful slice of users.
- Local businesses get a free storefront whose reach scales with the platform's seven-plus monthly hours per user, giving owners a reason to maintain a Facebook Page ahead of — or instead of — their own website.
Second-order effects
- Portals' ad sales teams face pressure to justify homepage inventory against a platform where users spend the bulk of their online time, pushing Yahoo and peers toward emphasizing services and content Facebook does not host.
- Analytics firms like Compete gain a selling point: referral-source breakdowns become a standard deliverable, mirroring how sites began instrumenting for Twitter-driven traffic in 2009.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, web distribution bifurcates into search-sent and social-sent traffic, and the News Feed — not the portal homepage — becomes the routing layer through which mainstream users reach the rest of the web.
- Small-business web presence could consolidate around platform Pages plus a thin landing site, weakening the assumption that every business needs a full standalone website to be findable.
The trend: Social networks are evolving from destinations into distribution channels, competing directly with search portals as the internet's primary traffic router.