RIP Facebook? Not yet. Unique Visitors to Facebook.com jumped 20% in November
Written by Jay Meattle (contact - e-mail) -- December 5th, 2007 |
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In the space of a month, Facebook has gone from media darling to devil. However, all the bad PR didn’t hold back Facebook.com traffic in November. Unique visitors jumped 20%:
The big question — Are Facebook users even aware of their worsening privacy situation? Take a look at the chart below. Looks like regular Facebook users are mostly unaware of their worsening situation, or more likely don’t know what to do about it - not good.
According to one Facebook poll, 67% of all respondents had not even heard of the Facebook Beacon.
It’s generally a good idea to put users first, then investors. I hope the good people at Facebook HQ wake up quickly.
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December 5th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Beacon Now Optional: Reports of Facebook’s Demise Greatly Exaggerated
According to some new data from Compete.com this morning, Facebook traffic was up 20 percent month-over-month
December 5th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Facebook Beacon: Privacy Disaster or PR Blip on the Road to World Domination? Let’s look at the data.
thanks to Jay Meattle at Compete for some data & a reality check.
December 5th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Is there anyway to see time spent on FB or page views broken out by age groups?
December 5th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
I think we need instances like ‘Facebook Beacon’ to learn as user and as service provider. And in regards to privacy and transparency there is a lot more to learn. We the user must take the drivers seat and service provider need to learn to provide the service we want. As long as all partizipants learn fast, there is still a lot of potential for Facebook and alike - international market penetration are just on the beginning
e.g.
in Germany Facebook increased its registered User base since 22-Nov-2007 - just within six week - by 75 percent to 455,800 …
December 5th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Unique Visitors to Facebook.com Jumped 20% in November
Compete reports a 20% traffic jump at Facebook despite growing viewer ship of its privacy terms and conditions.
December 5th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
they just announced an opt-out for beacon today.
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=7584397130
December 5th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Beacon Saga Comes to an End: Facebook Adds Global Opt-Out, Apologizes
Further, a new report from Compete shows that Facebook’s total unique traffic jumped 20% in November.
December 5th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Primarily Facebook is still “thriving” because they are letting the whole public into the site. It is no longer a unique college atomosphere.
December 5th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
What you missed altogether is the jump is the RESULT of the beacon being on pages. It’s not real traffic to Facebook, its’ Facebook URL’s being on all the partner sites. Check your numbers. You need to revise your numbers to exclude the uniques picked up by beacon.
December 5th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Facebook is here to stay, along with MySpace, that’s obvious. RIP Facebook? Not so soon..
December 6th, 2007 at 5:21 am
Why do all the numbers peak in the first week of August
But on the graph, it reaches an EXTREME peak the first week of September????
Could you clarify, this appears to be a conflict?
December 6th, 2007 at 9:47 am
@Silicon Valley - the graph is for unique visitor traffic to one section on facebook (facebook.com/privacy*) and not the entire site. When traffic to an entire site is up, it doesn’t necessarily always mean traffic to every single pages on the site is up too or follow the same trend.
December 6th, 2007 at 9:57 am
I wrote an article here (http://www.itproportal.com/38A287A1146D514F9B603F6C654FF6BD/Article.asp) with particular attention to Per User stats. While the number of unique visitors has been growing, the total number of page views and sessions has been falling. The “per visitor” stats are even more worrying.
Three important variables, unique session per visitor, page views per visitor and page views per sessions are all down. According to my calculations, extrapolated from your data, page views per visitors is at a one year low (under 500 pages per visitor).
December 6th, 2007 at 10:48 am
F.D. Athow,
I think some of these stats falling can be traced to Facebook’s major site redesign.
The ability to quickly get a mini feed of everything that has changed in their network significantly reduces the amount of time and pageviews it takes people to check up on their friends.
Although this does not address the number of sessions per user, I really think that time spent and pageviews per person is a double edged sword… is their site confusing and unintuitive and cause people to spend more time or are they spending time because they are engaged? Are pageviews inflated because content is buried deep into a sites design or is exactly what you want just 1 or 2 clicks away?
AP
December 6th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
@Joe - We did a little poking around. According to Compete data, 2.3M people total (facebook + non-facebook users) were exposed to Facebook beacons in November.
December 7th, 2007 at 5:44 am
Andrew,
Remember a social website called Myspace which used confusing user interface to boost page views? Like it or not, Pageviews is still a “trusted” metrics in the world of brandketing….. And the more confused is the site, the more time you spend on it. It is a pity though that we don’t have figures as to how long the sessions are. That would have been interesting! Can Compete do anything here?
December 8th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
@ #16 F.D. Athow -
Compete does indeed report on Average Stay:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+myspace.com?metric=avgStay
December 20th, 2007 at 8:05 am
I personally don’t think that highly of facebook and really think that privacy is a number 1 issue for most members. Facebook needs to really get there act together..
December 24th, 2007 at 11:12 am
here’s a list of other sites who profited in november
http://chrislandium.myminicity.com/
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:12 am
I am afraid that most of the users do not know what is “online-privacy”, rather than they care.
January 13th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Interesting stuff, I am going to have to read some of these posts. Need to check out facebook.
January 15th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Facebook will never RIP. Everyone I know is on it and uses is regularly and since its ran well it doesnt get hacked and spammed. Facebook is here to stay. People don’t up and leave their profiles and friends for something else. Facebook is like the Coca-Cola of Social Networking. Its one of the first to really take off and will always be top notch.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
hmmm very interesting.. i guess i’d better enjoy the face book advertising while i still can..
January 15th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Facebook is the biggest bag of crap I have ever seen, I joined myspace a while back, yes you do get spammed or should i say YOU USED TO GET SPAMMED. Since myspace have added captcha and upped their security levels it hasn’t happened to me. Facebook may not be getting spammed at the moment, but there’s no guarantee that it wont in time!
Facebook was originally designed for uni students in the USA, it should’ve been left with them. I joined Facebook to see what the big thing was all about after friends told me I should switch over to Facebook.
You have to put your real name to join, so I put a fake one in. The thing with Facebook is if you get a friends request you then get 1,000,000 questions on how you know that person, let alone you are bombarded with hundreds of add ons and super pokes, and people knowing your business.
I DON’T WANT PEOPLE KNOWING MY BUSINESS! The profile page is boring, it looks like a cv (english term for resume)
Myspace is where i will be staying, after all most of Facebooks users are originally from Myspace, and it won’t take them long to realise how wrong they were to change over.
Facebook is a big fad at the moment, but like all fads - it will die.
January 29th, 2008 at 4:01 am
it’s really!!!
March 13th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
I’ve used both services and much rather use facebook.
Here’s why
I find facebook is more like an address book then a social chat site (myspace.com). I log into facebook when I need to get in contact with specific people. Because users have to sign up with there real information on facebook it makes finding people easier. Facebooks interface is also a lot cleaner, I don’t have to search through a million different layouts of everyone of my friends pages to find the information i’m looking for.
I think facebook is good for organizing, planning and catching up with old friends but that’s about it. If your a social cat and love spending tons of hours chatting online I think myspace is the better site.
March 17th, 2008 at 7:14 am
It will go on for a long time, IMO. It won’t fade out soon…
March 19th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Privacy is in the hands of the Facebook user ultimately. There are controls, and, ultimately, it is up the the consumer (user) to ensure that information is controlled. I prefer Facebook over MySpace, even though I have accounts on both. I simply got tired of being spammed from Nigeria on MySpace by people pretending to be 24 year old female Brain Surgeons from the US, but they didn’t have a clue on how to put a sentence together. That does not happen on FB. In my opinion, I have more control over my info on FB.
February 13th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
What will be even more interesting is when this becomes “Google-Book” - trust me, it will happen.
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