Facebook surpasses Yahoo

According to Compete.com’s new January data, the biggest news is that Facebook.com has just surpassed Yahoo! as the second biggest online destination in the world in terms of monthly unique visitors. What will be really interesting is to see how this shakes out over the course of the coming months. Compete is one of the best resources out there in terms of verifying traffic levels for particular websites. I recommend it for anyone who’s not been exposed to the web analytics world.
During the month of January, according to Compete.com, facebook drew nearly 134 million Unique visitors. That’s of significant interest when looking at the number of total users for the site, which just eclipsed 400 million in the last month. Facebook has alot of steam and continues to grow rapidly, particularly in emerging markets, so it’ll be interesting to see if Google, who is late to the social networking game with Buzz, will be able to put much of a dent in the traffic.

One of the most important things to note about social networks is that, like other networks, they experience the “network effect”, that is, they become significantly more useful as more people use them. That’s been true for ages but no network has climbed as quickly as they have. Google took a step in the right direction in terms of establishing the network effect by almost automatically rolling the Buzz platform out to millions of gmail users, but it’s yet to be seen how big the impact will be long term or if that was the right strategy for sustained growth.

We’re Number Two! Facebook moves up one big spot in the charts