Hitwise: Facebook.com N...

In case you happened to be the victim of a day-long coma yesterday, it was a very exciting day for Mark Zuckerberg , Silicon Valley, and that quaint little social network we’ve all come to know, love, and be terrified of. Facebook filed its S-1 on Thursday with the crystal clear intent to go public on a market near you very soon, and will be raising $5 billion ahead of its IPO at an expected valuation of between $75 and $100 billion. The company’s filing revealed some significant (or perhaps mind-melting) stats, including the fact that Facebook is seeing 845 million users every month, half of whom are daily users, and half of whom are mobile users. Zuck still owns 28 percent of the company , among other things; really that was just the beginning. In fact, there was so much excitement and noise around Facebook’s IPO yesterday that the volume of visitors looking to check out Facebook’s filing for themselves succeeded in crashing the SEC’s website . Hitwise tells us that SEC.gov apparently saw a 15 percent increase in total visits, compared to the day before and a 42 percent compared to previous Thursday. And guess who was the number two source of traffic for the site? That’s right, TechCrunch.com — coming in less than 3 percent behind the top source, Google.com. Thanks to you, readers, we gave the SEC all the traffic they could handle. And apparently more. Today, Heather Dougherty, Director of Research at Hitwise shared some further stats , which provide a great follow-up to yesterday’s IPO madness. Yes, a $75 to $100 billion valuation is enough to marinate on, but just how much traffic — and what kind is — Facebook.com generating? While this data is from January, many readers may already be familiar with a lot of this, but it’s just further evidence of how colossal Facebook’s share of the market has become — both at home and abroad. For starters, Hitwise found that Facebook.com is now seeing one out of every eleven visits in the U.S., and one out of five pageviews online in the U.S. takes place on Facebook.com. Yep, 20 percent of pageviews in the U.S. happen on the Facebooks. [Insert Myspace dig here.] Furthermore, in terms of engagement, the average visit time on Facebook.com is 20 minutes, and breakdown of male to female in Facebook’s visitors, shows that the social network is more popular among women, as 57 percent of its traffic for the last 3 months, ending January 28th, came from the ladies. Meanwhile, the ages of Facebook.com visitors shows that the breakdown of its its visit share by age compares favorably to the online population, as you can see in the graph to the right. As Erick said yesterday, Facebook managed to report $1 billion in profits for 2011, which is a fairly exact number, considering all of the variables at play. It could be that Zuckerberg managed accounting to come out at this round, even number, a sign to investors that the company has everything completely under control. Investors love predictability. And on that note, beyond the average of 20 minutes users are spending on the site, 96 percent of of visitors to Facebook.com were returning visitors in January 2012. Hitwise’s numbers also show that, in terms of reaching affluent users, Facebook’s size allowed the site to win 499,949,430 visits from the most affluent income group, ahead of YouTube at 223,732,591 visits and Twitter at 15,166,795 visits. Facebook makes billionaires and caters to them. Further adding to its accolades, when it comes to search, “Facebook” happens be the most searched term in the U.S., with Facebook-related terms accounting for 14 percent of the top search clicks. is the most searched term in the US and Facebook-related terms account for 14% of the top search clicks. Internationally, Facebook.com remains in the top market in every country aside from China, due to the influence of China’s Facebook and Twitter competitors, Sina Weibo, Baidu, and Renren, which are the largest generators of traffic. The social network’s largest web footprint is in Canada, where it captures 12 percent of all visits in the market. With all the excitement around Facebook yesterday, it really comes as no surprise that Facebook.com is, according to Hitwise, “the largest website in the U.S. and a top performer in numerous international markets.” The loyalty, engagement, and sheer number of monthly users proves that this company is, simply put, a freak of Internet nature. The social network has spread across the Web with its sharing functionalities, Facebook Connect, and is bringing social to just about every industry imaginable. Zuck’s proposed goal of making its social graph portable and fundamental to the fabric of the Web has certainly been realized, as it played an integral role in the rise of Zynga, social gaming, is making eCommerce social, music, and on and on. For more on the Hitwise data, check out the post here . And here’s more of TechCrunch’s coverage of Facebook IPO Day: Facebook Files For $5 Billion IPO Yes, We Actually Changed Our Logo To Zuck (A Facebook IPO Round Up) Facebook’s S-1 Letter From Zuckerberg Urges Understanding Before Investment Facebook’s S-1 Reveals: 845 Million Users Every Month, More Than Half Daily, Half Mobile Facebook’s S-1 And The Largest Shareholders: Zuck Owns 28 Percent Facebook IPO Crashes SEC Website

The 5.39%. Occupy Movem...

Guess who seems to be most interested in the plight of the 99% ? “Jetset urbanites” according to Experian Hitwise, which used its Experian Mosiac audience profiling system to track traffic to Occupy movement sites from various consumer lifestyles, because hey, why not? According to Experian Mosaic, which separates people into Starbucks-esque categories like “Gotham Blend,” “Dare to Dream,” “Aging of Aquarius” and “Bohemian Grove” (a little vomit just came up into my mouth), sites like occupywallstreet.org   and others in the Occupy category were most visited in the past three months by “Jetset Urbanites,”  a segment of the population that was “highly affluent, progressive and tends to live in major metropolitan areas” with a group of people known as “Colleges and Cafes” coming in second with regards to visits. Quelle surprise! Also not surprising when you think about is the fact that “Small Town Shallow Pockets” — one of the least affluent psychographic segments – is contributing a sizable share of the visits relative to their online population, you know because they actually are the 99% and thus might you know care. Experian also reminds us that interest in the OWS movement ebbs and flows with newsworthy events, peaking during the movement’s first two weeks, then again during the clearing of Zuccotti Park and then again during the movement’s two month anniversary. There’s a Greek saying that goes, “The person with an empty refrigerator doesn’t philosophize.” I don’t know exactly how it’s applicable in this case, I just thought it was kind of cool.

Google Loses and Bing-P...

Google-powered search saw a month-over-month decline in market share in August, while Bing-powered search saw an increase, according to Compete. Meanwhile, separate data from Hitwise shows that "facebook" pervades the top search terms.

Hitwise: Singaporeans S...

Hitwise just published a new study examining how much time people living in different countries spend on Facebook. Singaporeans actually spend the longest on the social network, with an average of 38 minutes and 46 seconds per session, while people living in Brazil spend less than half that with an average of 18 minutes and 19 seconds per Facebook session for August 2011. Singapore is followed by New Zealand (30 mins 31 sec); Australia (26 mins 27 sec); the UK (25 mins 33 sec); and the US (20 mins 46 sec). Brazil actually has the highest percentage of Internet visits going to social sites (18.9% of Internet usage) with 43% of all social networking visits in Brazil going to Google-owned Orkut. In contrast, the UK has the lowest market share of visits going to social networks with 12.2% of visits. Facebook was the most visited Social Networking site in the US in August 2011 receiving 91% of visits among the sites followed by Twitter with 1.92% of visits. Tagged.com ranked 3rd for the first time, passing MySpace.com with 1.04% of US Internet visits. The fastest growing country in terms of visits is India, which saw an an increase in market share of 88% in August 2011 compared to August 2010. The US also experienced a market share increase from Facebook of 5% year on year. It’s no surprise that Facebook is seeing major growth internationally and in the U.S. Marc Zuckerberg just revealed that as many as 500 million members have used used Facebook in a given day, which is a milestone for the network. And the social network saw a record number of visitors in July.

SocMetrics Questions Go...

A few days ago, traffic analysis firm Experian Hitwise shared the results of a study of over 10 million online users, and concluded from its findings that Google’s new social network, Google+, was headed into mainstream territory. While not entirely disputing that data, social media monitoring firm SocMetrics , comes to a slightly different conclusion today by examining one particular vertical: moms . Says SocMetrics , the group containing the “moms” influencers is a key segment for Google+ to focus on growing, especially considering that one of the social network’s key differentiators is the ability to post privately or semi-privately via its user-created “Circles” (friend lists). But the moms group is “substantially less engaged” on Google+ than others, SocMetrics found. Unlike Hitwise, SocMetrics doesn’t look at visitors to websites –  it analyzes social media mentions. This includes mentions on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube as well as Digg, Reddit and Disqus. In this case, the firm tracked conversations (1 million per day) from July 20th to August 10th, and further broke that down by vertical (industry or group). Generally, there were a few thousand conversations per day about Google+ or Facebook. Moms Show Up on “Influencers” List In the chart below, SocMetrics shows that it’s primarily industry types (e.g. tech, marketing, security, developers, etc.) who are talking about Google+. Other more mainstream verticals, like sports, celebrity and fashion, are under-represented on Google+ when using this method for analysis. In fact, out of the top 25 segments talking about Google+, the network has only one which could be considered “mainstream” – the moms. Still, this group is far more active on both Facebook and Twitter than on Google+, which sees 30% to 50% less engagement based on these conversations. There are a couple of ways you can interpret this data – either you believe it clearly shows Google+’s struggle to cross over into mainstream groups, or you may think the fact moms even make the list of engaged verticals shows promise for the social networking site. As far as SocMetrics is concerned, the firm feels its data shows fairly similar curves to Hitwise’s earlier findings. There, Hitwise looked at selected segments called “colleges and cafes,” “kids and cabernet,” “status seeking singles,” and “full pockets empty nests.” (Yes, those are apparently segments.) Regardless of those oddly named groupings, Hitwise’s data shows a general flattening trend in terms of growth (see below). SocMetrics says none of this means that Google+ won’t eventually reach the mainstream, but right now it’s not on track to do so. Google needs to move quickly to capitalize on the window of opportunity it has with mainstream groups such as moms, the firm concludes, before their attention wanes even further. Considering Google’s most recent hire , however, it looks like the company is indeed aware of its challenges with Google+ and is rapidly moving to address them. Crunchbase GOOGLE+ Product: GOOGLE+ Website: http://plus.google.com Company