Facebook is second-most visited site in US

Thu Feb 18 2010, 08:36 AM

Facebook has passed Yahoo! to become the second most popular website in the US, pulling in nearly 133.6m unique visitors in January according to data from Compete. Facebook's traffic grew by nearly 1.5m users between December and January, while Yahoo!'s fell by 100,000 to 132m.

Yahoo! was the biggest web portal in the world until February 2008, when rival Google overtook it. The site has seen its traffic drop in recent months while both Google and Facebook have continued to grow. However, Google still has a significant lead, drawing in 147.8m visitors in January.

"There has been a changing of the guard at the top of the top of the internet food chain," says Compete analyst Aaron Prebluda. "The big question is can Facebook now conquer the Google traffic throne."

The average time that users spend on Facebook is also continuing to increase, with internet users now spending 11.6% of their online time on the social network. This is compared to 4.25% for Yahoo! and 4.1% for Google. Data from Nielsen also shows an engagement increase, with users spending an average of seven hours on Facebook compared to two hours spent on Yahoo! and Google.

"On this front Facebook is second to none," says Prebluda. He adds that Facebook has been smart in putting all of its products under one domain name which not only increases the time they spend on the site but also its monthly visitors. Yahoo!, in comparison, has a number of sub-domains which aren't included in the report, with data from the likes of Delicious and Flickr also left out.