Facebook.com overtakes Google.com as most visited USA domain.
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If it's the rest of the Internet, then Google is better positioned.
What's striking to me is how much Facebook's approach is not "of" the Internet; Facebook is a site that takes the best of the Internet and places it within the borders of its own site. They've done a great job of that to date: my mum uses it every day and loves it.
Google appears much more inclined to believe it will grow as the Internet grows, and they are investing accordingly. True, they haven't hit many home runs outside of search, but they are willing to contribute to the web, which is the ultimate vendor-agnostic platform.
Google is investing in things it can't control. Facebook is investing only in things it can. I'm overgeneralizing of course, but over time I think Google's open nature wins because consumers eventually reject those companies who gain too much control.
Except for youtube which is #4 worldwide and blogger.com #7, not to mention their adsense ads that are all over the web. And don't forget buzz, that is building an open distributed social network over the internet. I think google is doing real fine against facebook.
For example, compare delicious/flickr -> yahoo to youtube/blogger -> google.
"But Tatham noted that when he added up traffic on all Google properties like Google Maps and YouTube, the company's sites comprised 11.03% of visits. Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) was second with 10.98%."
Facebook still has some catching up to do.
Takeaways:
We spent 1/5th the money on FB to get the same number of people on our landing page.
The % of people filling up the landing page form was approximately the same from FB and Google on weekdays. Google traffic did better on weekends.
FB ads work best when they don't try to do a hard sell. Google ads work better when there is a hard sell.
I think this has to do with user intent. On Goog, people are already looking for something, so directly addressing that is a good idea. On FB, people will look at an ad and get curious only if you get their interest, and it doesn't look like you're saying 'GIVE ME YOUR MONEY' :)
However, I don't see Facebook replacing Google as the primary advertising medium on the Internet--ever. Google's power is that its ads can be placed anywhere with no action on the user's end to be targeted appropriately. Adsense is totally plug-and-play.
To compete with Google, Facebook needs to find a better way to syndicate its ads across the Internet. Unfortunately for them, however, all their advertising power is stuck inside their network. You need to log into Facebook to get targeted ads, which is a huge barrier for Facebook to overcome.
We'll see how it plays out, but IMHO Facebook needs to rethink its advertising strategy to even begin competing with the likes of Google.
I'm sure many people follow Facebook ads, but I'm not one of them. Especially since they are mostly trying to trick people. Like showing random pictures in the ads that have no meaning to the actual product.
I wonder how many people seriously think that the adverts aren't pulling your age out of your profile. Enough to make it work I'm sure though.
Facebook is also finally moving into virtual currency, with the launch of Facbeook credits. Did you know Zynga is the second largest PayPal merchant after eBay itself?
The right language parsing makes these incredibly high value targets for TV ads, review sites, etc.
Probably a few years down the road, or alternatively FB just needs to get a few mutant geniuses locked in a room for six months.
I'm also curious if the people that spend the most time on Facebook are the people who earn Facebook the most money. It seems like the high school and college students who can spend all their time browsing the site are also the people least likely to spend money. Does anyone have any insight into the relative value of different demographics?
Facebook might have nice structured data about demographics and other user information but dollar for dollar investing in Google Adwords is exponentially more effective then Facebook. The reason being advertising on Facebook is more akin to advertising on TV, people using the service aren't searching for anything and ads feel exactly like ads. Adwords works because they actually help people find what they're looking for.
Facebook may have achieved several hundred million dollars in advertising revenue (and search deals with Microsoft) the last few years, but if they are going to convince people to invest a billion dollars, or at Google's level several tens of billions of dollars, in advertising dollars, they need to figure out a way to make advertising on Facebook at least as effective as Google.
I for one, simply don't see that happening - ever. I see Facebook's destiny as a very low margin potentially public social network company, but the next Google? That's a long long loooooong shot.
'Ever' is a long time.
The key issue is that right now, Google is a better place to start a commerce-oriented (and especially high-dollar commerce-oriented) task, and reveal (by your queries) your intent in a way advertisers can hook into.
But, with enough work and experimentation, could Facebook become a better place to start such tasks, and reveal such intent?
It's not out of the question, and Facebook should have internal experiments trying to create -- and be on the lookout for acquisitions of -- features that bring the initiation of ad-friendly commerce-oriented tasks into their platform.
For sites that had facebook connect available for login, they would be able to serve ads customized on a per-user basis - provided the underlying http ad request can include some sort of unique per-session hash, instead of being funneled through the traditional facebook connect API.
Their problem, of course, comes with attempting to monetize areas of their site which do not require a facebook connect-enabled login to continue.
I'd be frightened of this for a few reasons:
- FBC may become required - not optional - on many sites which do not currently require it. The flip side of this is it forces the sites which wish to fully monetize to actually come up with interesting and unique ways to tie into the user's social graph (in order to drive uptake of FBC as a protocol). On the other hand, it provides single sign on - which many, many users have been clamoring for (even if they didn't know it), for years.
- I dislike the FBC protocol, and wish they had gone MySpace's route with OpenSocial. It's much more sane to deal with. If the FBC protocol and widget mechanism were more sane, it would drive up adoption on many current platforms that don't currently offer it.
- This potentially has even greater security and privacy concerns than Google has ever had to deal with. This may turn out to be a good thing.
Personally I switched to Facebook because it was exclusive to universities and I could see who was in my classes. Now that functionality is gone and pages are being filled with garbage apps more and more. I can definitely see another site that starts off exclusive to some demographic and slowly grows and actually stays 'pure' like the original Facebook beating Facebook.
Also am I the only one unsure how these stats are collected? For instance using a built-in search on the iPhone or in Firefox, are those considered visiting a domain because you reach google.com or do you have to explicitly type it and visit it with no referrer (I think the search bars put in some metadata to identify themselves, could be wrong though)?
Google will surely fight back, and probably be back on top by next week, but the trend is clear. This is not the beginning of the end for Google, but it is, as they say, the end of the beginning.
Facebook works the way humans work: people hear about stuff from the people around them. Google has to do crazy AI gymnastics to determine intent of keywords, and yet still people often can't find things simply because the keywords they pick aren't the "right" ones, leaving them frustrated. But their friends always know what they mean. (Twitter is also very, very well positioned for this kind of ambient sharing)
I also think its a bit simplistic to state 'Facebook works the way humans work' as people hear about stuff through numerous other channels than the people around them (ie: nyt.com dining & wine section for a new restaurant).
The 'crazy AI gymnastics' Google is doing isn't for nothing. I actually think those gymnastics are advancing the web in ways other companies aren't. There will always be some overhead to interacting with your friends on the web and those gymnastics Google is doing make the web a better platform for people to interact with (more like your friend).
Take your Dining&Wine section example: that's what they did 3 years ago. But 10 years ago -- and still today -- they're much more likely to visit somewhere that a friend mentioned they visited. The social discovery mechanism is so natural that you don't even think about it as a discovery mechanism, but it's really the dominant source of information for nearly everybody. Facebook and other social networks are only just learning the right way to use that data (and the ground is littered with companies that have failed, even with the same data).
To extend on that: Facebook won’t replace Google. Facebook and Google get so many visits because of different things. Demand for search won’t falter because social networks increase in popularity. I, at least, cannot see how that would be possible.
But – just so there are no misunderstandings – Google and Facebook are nevertheless clearly competitors. There is a finite amount of money that will be spent on advertising and Google and Facebook will both be fighting for a large piece that cake. And at some point in the future online advertising will have grown up so that there won’t be always more and more money coming into the system.
What about all those sites using Google Analytics? even Twitter is among them.
The ad money is at the same place where people are spending their money.
Look at facebook ads, a lot of them are for other social networking sites, very few are for actual products or services.
Until facebook becomes a place where people go to shop, their ads will be in a completely different league.
"Facebook.com overtakes Google.com as most visited domain by people living in USA." might be better.
Title makes it sound like 'google.com and facebook.com are both USA domains, and facebook has overtaken google as most visited'.
The thing is, unlike Google, which had a good, scalable business plan, and was able to grow to its current size reasonably and organically, Facebook is continually propped up by outside investment and debt.
Facebook also right now has a much, much smaller staff than Google to be handling all of that traffic and attention.
Do we expect Facebook to become a mainstay or will they become too big for their britches and topple? What do you people think?