Compete, ComScore, Nielsen and Quantast Show Growing Facebook Traffic in April 2010

Facebook continued to grow in the United States and around the world in April, according to our latest look at data from third party measurement firms including Compete, comScore, Nielsen and Quantast. This follows a dip that most firms showed at some point in February or March. For those who are interested in spotting any hit to its traffic, there's not much to see yet. Press coverage of the issues only really began at the end of April, a week or so after Facebook directed users to make their interests more open and launched a range of privacy-stretching new products like Instant Personalization. We'll be covering May data as it comes out. For now, we're intrigued to see that traffic actually went up at the end of April, at least according to one of the services below. Compete Following a dip in February, Facebook has once again continued to grow, according to the firm. The company had the most unique US visitors yet, at 135.4 million. Out of its nearest direct competitors, MySpace dropped to 44.4 million and Twitter stayed around the same as past months at 21.5 million. ComScore Facebook grew by 5.5 million or so to 121.8 million unique visitors in April, in the US. Like Compete, it showed a February dip for Facebook. But unlike Compete, it showed MySpace rising. ComScore is also the only service to publicly provide worldwide numbers. It showed Facebook growing by 33 million or so users to 519 million, with both MySpace and Twitter seeing growth as well. Nielsen Matching comScore, Nielsen showed Facebook going from around 117 million in March to 122 million in April. It also showed News Corp properties seeing a a gain within its monthly web rankings, but it's not clear what portion was MySpace versus other sites. Quantcast Finally, Quantast is showing a similar gain in April, going from 125 million uniques in the US in March to 130 million for April. The company provides graphs that plot out more incremental changes, and it shows an uptick at the end of April. Perhaps the new products were driving more usage, regardless of the privacy issues? Or maybe all the publicity for Facebook was actually attracting more users? We'll see in next month's data. Facebook To close out, here's a mention of Facebook's own data. We track it every month using the company's advertising tool; the caveat is always that we don't know if the data in the tool is delayed, or if so, by how much. That noted, Facebook registered 4.4 million new US users for a time period that is likely April, to 125 million. That number is a little above Nielsen and comScore and below Compete and Quantcast -- so quite possibly right.

Social Pro Daily

Compete, ComScore, Nielsen and Quantast Show Growing Facebook Traffic in April 2010

Eric Eldon

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Eric Eldon