In case you happened to be the victim of a day-long coma yesterday, it was a very exciting day for Mark Zuckerberg,
Silicon Valley, and that quaint little social network we’ve all come to
know, love, and be terrified of. Facebook filed its S-1 on Thursday
with the crystal clear intent to go public on a market near you very
soon, and will be raising $5 billion ahead of its IPO at an expected
valuation of between $75 and $100 billion.
The company’s filing revealed some significant (or perhaps mind-melting) stats, including the fact that Facebook is seeing 845 million users every month, half of whom are daily users, and half of whom are mobile users. Zuck still owns 28 percent of the company, among other things; really that was just the beginning.
In fact, there was so much excitement and noise around Facebook’s IPO
yesterday that the volume of visitors looking to check out Facebook’s
filing for themselves succeeded in crashing the SEC’s website.
Hitwise tells us that SEC.gov apparently saw a 15 percent increase in
total visits, compared to the day before and a 42 percent compared to
previous Thursday. And guess who was the number two source of traffic
for the site? That’s right, TechCrunch.com — coming in less than 3
percent behind the top source, Google.com. Thanks to you, readers, we
gave the SEC all the traffic they could handle. And apparently more.
Today, Heather Dougherty, Director of Research at Hitwise shared some further stats,
which provide a great follow-up to yesterday’s IPO madness. Yes, a $75
to $100 billion valuation is enough to marinate on, but just how much
traffic — and what kind is — Facebook.com generating? While this data is
from January, many readers may already be familiar with a lot of this,
but it’s just further evidence of how colossal Facebook’s share of the
market has become — both at home and abroad.
For starters, Hitwise found that Facebook.com is now seeing one out
of every eleven visits in the U.S., and one out of five pageviews online
in the U.S. takes place on Facebook.com. Yep, 20 percent of pageviews
in the U.S. happen on the Facebooks. [Insert Myspace dig here.]
Furthermore, in terms of engagement, the average visit time on
Facebook.com is 20 minutes, and breakdown of male to female in
Facebook’s visitors, shows that the social network is more popular among
women, as 57 percent of its traffic for the last 3 months, ending
January 28th, came from the ladies.
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Meanwhile, the ages of Facebook.com visitors shows that the breakdown
of its its visit share by age compares favorably to the online
population, as you can see in the graph to the right.
As Erick said yesterday, Facebook managed to report $1 billion in
profits for 2011, which is a fairly exact number, considering all of the
variables at play. It could be that Zuckerberg managed accounting to
come out at this round, even number, a sign to investors that the
company has everything completely under control. Investors love
predictability.
And on that note, beyond the average of 20 minutes users are spending
on the site, 96 percent of of visitors to Facebook.com were returning
visitors in January 2012. Hitwise’s numbers also show that, in terms of
reaching affluent users, Facebook’s size allowed the site to win
499,949,430 visits from the most affluent income group, ahead of YouTube
at 223,732,591 visits and Twitter at 15,166,795 visits. Facebook makes
billionaires and caters to them.
Further adding to its accolades, when it comes to search, “Facebook” happens be the most searched term
in the U.S., with Facebook-related terms accounting for 14 percent of
the top search clicks. is the most searched term in the US and
Facebook-related terms account for 14% of the top search clicks.
Internationally, Facebook.com remains in the top market in every
country aside from China, due to the influence of China’s Facebook and
Twitter competitors, Sina Weibo, Baidu, and Renren, which are the
largest generators of traffic. The social network’s largest web
footprint is in Canada, where it captures 12 percent of all visits in
the market.
With all the excitement around Facebook yesterday, it really comes as
no surprise that Facebook.com is, according to Hitwise, “the largest
website in the U.S. and a top performer in numerous international
markets.” The loyalty, engagement, and sheer number of monthly users
proves that this company is, simply put, a freak of Internet nature. The
social network has spread across the Web with its sharing
functionalities, Facebook Connect, and is bringing social to just about
every industry imaginable. Zuck’s proposed goal of making its social
graph portable and fundamental to the fabric of the Web has certainly
been realized, as it played an integral role in the rise of Zynga,
social gaming, is making eCommerce social, music, and on and on.
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