Hitwise says Facebook Most Popular U.S. Site
New data released from analytics service Hitwise today names Facebook the largest website in the U.S. with 7.07% of all U.S. visits. Google is second at 7.03%. Yahoo Mail is third with 3.8% and Yahoo is fourth at 3.67% …
Context & Ripple Effects
Hitwise's March 2010 ranking hands Facebook the top spot among U.S. websites with 7.07% of visits, a hair above Google at 7.03% — a symbolic flip, since Google has been the default reference point for American web traffic. Tellingly, Yahoo Mail (3.8%) outdraws Yahoo's main portal (3.67%) within the same company, a sign that user attention is pooling into single destinations rather than spreading across a homepage.
The timing frames the contest: the same week, Hitwise's data landed while Google was publicly tying its growth story to smartphones, saying powerful handsets are lifting mobile ad rates and predicting those rates will eventually surpass its PC-based rates. The company being edged out on the desktop visit chart is already repositioning where it expects attention and pricing power to sit.
First-order effects
- Facebook gains a top-of-chart claim — most popular U.S. site by visit share — that its ad sales team can put directly against Google and Yahoo when pitching display inventory.
- Yahoo's own numbers show its audience concentrated in Mail rather than the portal, meaning its flagship brand is no longer its highest-traffic property.
Second-order effects
- Google's counter-move is already visible in its own statements: with the desktop visit crown slipping, it points to smartphones as the driver of rising mobile ad rates it expects to exceed PC rates — making mobile, not the homepage chart, the arena it cares about.
- Rankings like this raise Hitwise's leverage as referee: whoever is declared 'biggest' gets a sales asset, so advertisers and rivals have reason to challenge or commission measurement.
Third-order effects
- If visit share keeps consolidating into one dominant destination, portal businesses built on aggregating links outward — Yahoo's model — face structural erosion of their middleman role no matter which individual property ranks where.
- Traffic leadership turning into a marketing trophy entrenches analytics firms as industry referees and pushes players to champion whichever metric flatters them, fragmenting what 'most popular' even means.
The trend: U.S. web attention is consolidating around single social and communications destinations, displacing search and portal homepages as the default entry point while revenue narratives shift toward mobile.