According to an article in the New York Post, Facebook got it’s first ever #1 Web Site ranking on both December 24th and 25th. With 7.81% of all US web traffic Christmas Day, Facebook even trumped the almighty Google–a rather mindblowing thought.
Facebook traffic has always spiked around the Holidays but now that the social network’s audience doubled during the course of 2009 to over 350 million users, it finally has the heft to displace even search.
If you’re still wondering how Facebook is ever going to make money, just review those Facebook facts again–conveniently posted for your perusal at http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics :
- Over 350 million active users, half logging on every day for fifty five minutes.
- Over 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
- Over 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
- Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect
- More than 65 million active users currently access Facebook through mobile devices, and they are almost 50% more active than non-mobile users
The key to Facebook’s future profits lies in data-mining. Because frankly, they are sitting on unimaginable volumes of it. And if their ferocious ongoing litigation with any third party that dares to access individual accounts and potentially scrape some of that data, they clearly intend to keep it all to themselves.
That’s not particularly social; it’s just business.