The Way i Go

The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide.  It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below). Facebook itself only officially acknowledges 250 million active registered users (but you don’t have to be a registered user to visit some Facebook pages).

In the past year, it has grown 157 percent, gaining 208 million visitors.  It long ago passed its rival MySpace on a global basis, way back in April, 2008. Since then, it has passing even bigger sites on its way up. In the chart above, the blue line is Facebook. It passed Amazon back in August, 2008. eBay fell by the wayside in January, 2009. It surged past AOL sometime in February, 2009, and just last month it finally passed the Wikimedia Foundation sites (which includes Wikipedia).

So there it stands at No. 4. It will be a while, if ever, before it catches up to the three world leaders: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. They each have between 240 million and 500 million more monthly global unique visitors than Facebook (see chart below). But it’s always good for a company to have stretch goals.

Worldwide unique visitors (June, 2009).  Source: comScore

1. Google Sites: 844 million
2. Microsoft Sites: 691 million
3. Yahoo! Sites: 581 million
4. Facebook: 340 million
5. Wikimedia Foundation sites: 303 million
6. AOL: 280 million
7. eBay: 233 million
8. CBS Interactive: 186 million
9. Amazon: 183 million
10. Ask Network: 174 million

In the U.S., Facebook had 77 million unique visitors in the month of June, making it the sixth largest site in the U.S. (after Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and all Fox Interactive Media sites combined).

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