Facebook Traffic Powers Through July, Third Party Measurement Services Show -- Same for August?

In June, Facebook's US traffic looked like it might be hurting, perhaps from user frustration with a variety of privacy issues -- key demographics registered a decline, and growth appeared to be roughly flat. But July brought recovery, as Facebook's own data showed it gaining millions more users. Here's our look at what third-party web measurement firms are now showing for July -- and August, for those firms that have made their numbers available already -- following up on our analysis of them from last month. With several exceptions, the overall trend is more Facebook growth in the US and around the world. ComScore Facebook had a solid July, going from 141.6 million to 145.5 million unique visitors. ComScore has its August US numbers out, and it showed Facebook adding another 2.5 million new uniques over July to reach 148.0 million. Facebook's closest product rivals, MySpace and Twitter, continued to fall slightly, to 59.6 million and 23.8 million respectively last month. Worldwide, the numbers aren't yet available for August. But Facebook continued to boom in July climbing up 20 million from June to reach 571.5 million uniques. Other third parties don't publish worldwide numbers, and Facebook only intermittently provides worldwide stats, so we don't have a clear way of putting this number in context -- other than to point out that comScore is generally closer than most to what Facebook self-reports. MySpace continued to taper off, while Twitter appears to be a bigger hit abroad than in the US. On another note, comScore showed Facebook taking the lead in terms of time spent on site in the US in August. Google Ad Planner Aggregated from a variety of data sources, mainly Google's own tracking tools, the Ad Planner shows similar gains in August -- in the US. Facebook grew from 130 million the previous month to 140 million uniques. But world numbers did not show similar gains, as Facebook fell from 550 million to 540 million. Also, Google's daily unique visitor count for Facebook shows choppy gains over the summer. Quantcast While August isn't in yet, July is, and the firm shows Facebook rising from 130 million in June to 133 million. MySpace continued to fall, ending at 45.6 million and Twitter flat-lined at 44.4 million. Compete Finally, Compete's numbers are in for August. We looked at July's last month, and then it looked like Facebook was growing, from 124.7 million in June to 128.1 million. August dipped down, though, falling to 127.6 million uniques. Twitter and MySpace did, too. Conclusion Summer can be a slow month for web sites -- and Facebook included, as some of the web measurement firms seem to show. However, the collective view of Facebook provided by these companies is an upward US growth trend in July, more of that in August (although maybe not as much), and a similar trend worldwide. Our US estimates, derived from Facebook's self-reported ad tool, showed the company with 133.9 million monthly active US users in August, up around 5 million from July. For more on our data and reports, be sure to check out our Inside Facebook Gold service.

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Facebook Traffic Powers Through July, Third Party Measurement Services Show -- Same for August?

Eric Eldon

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Eric Eldon