Facebook’s meteoric rise
Over the past five years, Yahoo sites have taken a massive dip, while in recent years, Facebook has skyrocketed in terms of time on site. As Facebook rolls out their new timeline features and aims to keep users on the site, engaged for longer periods of time, a major selling point for advertisers.
Often, the only metric that media pays attention to is unique visitors to a site and frequency of logging on, but a great metric that measures legitimate interest in any site is how long a user stays on the site, with Facebook enjoying one of the highest times on site in the world.
“It’s a neat illustration of the Web 2.0 era, and does a nice job of explaining why Google is so freaked out about Facebook, and why AOL and Yahoo seem to be in eternal turnaround mode,” writes Peter Kafka at AllThingsD.com. “Note that just a couple of years ago, someone might have thought to include Myspace in here. Remember?”
People have grown accustomed to logging in to Facebook every day, just as they do with email, and much of Facebook’s activity is done via mobile, frequently as a means to fill time or to multi-task. Facebook is rising in prominence in Americans’ lives and becoming mainstream, a far cry from its original concept of being a private college network.
