Social Networking, Web Traffic | featured news

When it comes to releasing a new product, users and pundits’ opinions only count for so much, but numbers — including revenue and traffic– don’t lie... This week, the web analysts at Hitwise gathered data showing a 34% decline in visitors in the U.K. and a 24% decline in the U.S. in the past 11 weeks.

With the release of the new Digg on August 25th, anybody with the ability to understand how a story, which is promoted to the popular section, is composed, has an edge in attaining viral exposure ranging from tens of thousands to millions of pageviews. Diggs users constitute a large proportion of bloggers. Thus stories promoted to their popular section, which was previously their homepage and now the Top News page, can attain anywhere from less than 10 to hundreds of links pointing to their websites.

U.S. Web surfers are spending more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google, according to new data from researchers at comScore Inc.

Facebook has more users than ever, says comScore. With its most recent privacy backlash seemingly behind it, Facebook surged ahead to a new traffic record in the U.S. during the month of June. According to comScore, the social network pulled in more than 141 million unique visitors in the U.S. during the month, beating its previous record (set in May) by better than 11 million.

Social networking platform Facebook racked up the most U.S. hits on its Web site last week, edging past search giant Google to be the country's most-visited site for that period, according to data from research firm Hitwise.

It was the upstart rock star of the Internet in early 2009, roaring out of relative obscurity to become one of the most exposed -- some would say overexposed -- services on the Web.

Christmas is a holiday that brings people together, so perhaps it should be no surprise that Facebook has become a part of millions of peoples' Christmas experiences. For the first time in its history, Facebook was the #1 most visited website in the United States on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year, according to traffic analyst firm Hitwise today.

Twitter’s U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors from 19.24 million unique visitors in October. It’s no surprise that Twitter’s U.S. growth is stalling as the numbers have indicated this pattern for some time.

Just last week, Aol celebrated its re-emergence as an independently-traded company. But it's one main advantage is that it still commands a large audience, and in fact was the fourth largest Website in the U.S.—until last month. ComScore data for November, 2009 shows that Facebook surpassed Aol with 102.9 million unique visitors in the U.S., versus 99.7 million for Aol.

The MySpace social media network’s traffic has dropped so much that it will fail to satisfy a minimum traffic level crucial to parent company News Corp’s three-year $900 million advertising deal with Google, inked in 2006, that made Google the exclusive search advertiser on MySpace — then the world’s most popular social network.