Compete data from the year’s shortest month tells some interesting tales of love, speed, and the pursuit of sandwiches. Perhaps the biggest story, however, comes at the top. For the first time ever, Facebook overtook the top spot in Monthly Attention (time spent as a percentage of total time spent online by U.S. Internet users), commanding nearly 6% of all time spent online by Americans in the month of February. Good news for Facebook, but a tough defeat for dethroned Yahoo!. Looking at the graph below, it appears that Google is next in line to make the pass . . . we’ll keep our eyes on the story in the weeks ahead.

• Flower Power: Clearly, sending flowers on Valentine’s Day is not going out of style any time soon. No shocker that the big flower sites saw a bump in February: ftd.com (5.3 Million visits) led the way, followed by proflowers.com (2.06 Million), 1800flowers.com (1.72 Million), and teleflora.com (942,000).
• The Race is on!: Racing season kicked off with a bang with the Daytona 500 in mid-February. Some new sites rose quickly in the ranks, including pepsifantasyracing.com (955,293 visits), and nhra.net (714,981). Meanwhile, nascar.com visits (14.22 Million) were up 96% month over month.
• Who said there’s no such thing as a free lunch?: After the success of Denny’s Free Grand Slam breakfast day, some other popular eateries followed suit. Quiznos made it rain sandwiches in February on millionsubs.com, resulting in over 2 Million visits to the site. Rival Subway got in on the action at subwayfreshbuzz.com, growing month over month visits by 323% to 1.07 Million, and Jack-in-the-Box piggy-backed its unconventional Super Bowl ad with free drinks, fries, and other tasty offers at hangintherejack.com (1.06 Million visits).

Interested in diving deeper on your own?
All of the data in this post is available with Compete’s Site Analytics and Ranked List tools, so dive headfirst into the data and let us know what else has changed!

Earlier this month, Compete reported that Facebook overtook MySpace in Unique Visitors trafficking to the site:

Sure, this was a symbolic takeover, but it should have come as no surprise to anyone closely monitoring the two social giants over the past year.

Using a few different Compete PRO Site Analytics reports, I drilled down to take a closer look at trended traffic to understand the key metrics around Facebook’s rise to power in the social media arena.

The First Blow: October 2007 - Stickiness

While Unique Visitor data is certainly newsworthy, given Social Media’s value proposition to advertisers from an engagement perspective, the stickiness metrics are arguably more important than high level site traffic alone. Looking at historical engagement data, I rolled back the clock to October 2007, where we see Facebook eclipsing MySpace in the number of pages per visit for a visitor. This would prove to be the first of many battles won by Facebook along the way.

Round 2: Reach

Examining Daily Reach (people visiting a site on a given day as a percentage of all internet users on that day) over the past 6 months, we see that on January 4th, Facebook overtook MySpace in terms of Reach, surging forward in February to achieve a remarkable 15% (and climbing) Reach vs. 11% for MySpace.

Round 3: Attention

In terms of time spent, Monthly Attention (percentage of time spent on a site as a percentage of total time spent online) illustrates Facebook’s robust growth over the last year. In early 2008, approximately 7% of all time spent online was on MySpace (vs. 1.5% for Facebook), but as the year rolled along, Facebook gained more and more attention, eventually overtaking MySpace in October. As of January 2009, 5% of all time spent online was on Facebook, more than double MySpace.

The Knockout Punch?: Average Stay

If you’re MySpace, the graph below certainly stings – in the past two years, average stay for a visitor to the site has dropped from 30 minutes to 10 minutes. In the meantime, Facebook has steadily upped this number, leaving its rival in the dust. As of January 2009, Facebook kept visitors engaged on site over 7 minutes longer on average than MySpace, with the average stay still on the rise.

What will the rest of 2009 bring for both of these sites? The Compete team will continue to track the story going forward, but in the meantime, get in on the action yourself on compete.com.

What sort of changes did the New Year bring? Using Compete PRO Site Analytics and Ranked List tools, we drilled down to find the sites that showed the fastest growth month over month. Sites related to taxes, the inauguration, and weight loss all showed growth in January.

Some additional nuggets:

• Pepsi’s big splash: Rebranding one of the world’s biggest products is no small challenge, but Pepsi seems to have gotten off on the right foot by driving traffic to refresheverything.com. Visits to the site topped 898,000 in January, and specific ads around inauguration and the Super Bowl successfully resulted in driving traffic to the site (See PRO Daily Reach metrics below)

More interesting information:

• Inauguration Fever: Lots of Americans were clearly excited about a historic event, resulting in surging traffic to inauguratlcolletibles.com (622,000 visits), gigapan.org (730,000 visits), and obamaclock.org (1.18 Million visits). With an estimated 2 Million Americans actually attending the inauguration ceremony in DC, Washington tourism sites like Washington.org and dc.gov also showed significant gains, while the President elect’s sleek new whitehouse.gov site rose in the ranks.
• Pound-shedding promises for 2009: A New Year of course brings with it some resolutions. Weight loss sites surged in January - top movers included joybauer.com (1.58M visits), Slim-Fast.com (630,000), and affiliate sites nichollesweightloss.com (1.49M), helensdiet.com(584,000), and mariasdietblog.com (2.36 M).
• Sign of the Times: Job seekers hammered away online in January - some fast movers in the category included career-finder.org (495,000 visits), localjobsavailable.net (802,000) and employment-service.org (649,000).
• Desperate for cash – get your refund early!: Perhaps another sign of the times, tax sites heated up in January, with the most growth coming from freetaxusa.com (1.3M visits), taxactonline.com (12.5M) and turbotax.com (8.7M).

Find out how a new month of traffic has impacted site traffic, Search, and the overall internet landscape in your industry with all of Compete PRO’s powerful tools.

Please email membersupport@compete.commembersupport@compete.com or give us a call at 617-933-5600 with any questions