comScore: Facebook cringes over Facebook

^{The graph shows the percentage growth by March 2010, where March is taken as 100.}

comScore has released another batch of controversial statistics . They give figures for the total time spent by American users on different sites on the Internet from March 2010 to March 2011.

The graph shows that over the year Facebook “traffic” grew by about 70% (in minutes). Moreover, all other sites on the Internet in aggregate lost about 10% (in minutes).

Of course, time is a limited resource, and if one site becomes the central "point of attraction", then everyone else loses because of this. But the average American user spends on Facebook more than four hours a month, the penetration of social networks has reached 90% of the network audience.

Perhaps in a few years a similar fate awaits Russia (Ukraine, Belarus). If we assume that the Internet audience reaches its limit, as in the United States, and the penetration of social networks also reaches 90%, then the consequences could be even more serious than in America, because the Russians are among the world leaders in the amount of time spent on social networks ( 10.3 hours per month ). Here we overtake the Americans.



So in Russia, the drop in traffic on all other sites can be more than 10%.

However, there are many other indicators by which the argument about the “shrinking of the Web” can be challenged. The main thing is that there are objective statistics on user activity on the Internet: traffic in terabytes, the number of search queries, the number of downloaded videos, etc. All these indicators are growing, so it’s too early to talk about the “shrinking” of the Network and turning all sites into an “information appendage” for social networks.

In addition, the above schedule should not be misleading, as if users spend more time on Facebook than on other sites on the Internet. In fact, the share of Facebook is now about 12%.