ComScore says Facebook traffic dropped in September. We didn't think that was accurate. It turns out that traffic was only "down" because ComScore's measurement panel (along with Nielsen and others) only measures traffic from home. As students return to school, they are removed from the panel and traffic "drops." Facebook says that active monthly users is still rising at 3 percent a week, as it has since January 2007. [GigaOm]
Earlier, we scoffed at the idea that Facebook's traffic could have dropped in September. Compete.com — the poor man's ComScore, which makes its traffic data publicly available — just released September data that shows a similar drop. Maybe Facebook has peaked. More likely: since the kids returned to college, the free time they had to screw around on Facebook this summer has disappeared in favor of schoolwork and frat parties. MySpace, Orkut and Bebo were all down in September too. Amid the hysteria about Facebook's traffic dropping, everyone seems to have forgotten that Facebook traffic was down last September as well.
Facebook traffic dropped nearly 10 percent in September, according to a sneak peak at ComScore's latest stats given to GigaOm. That's a significant drop to a chart that's been climbing steadily all year, and especially odd during the start of a new school year when traffic traditionally soars for student sites. My Valleywag coworkers say that can't be right — it's a huge failure of ComScore's measurement methods that the company will have trouble explaining. Then again, I'm reminded of the anecdotal tale of the scientists who decided there must be a bug in their software because it showed — ha ha! — a gaping hole in the ozone layer.
British Internet users spend 11 minutes a day on social networks. Want something more interesting than that? Nielsen/NetRatings thinks Facebook is the top social net in the U.K. ComScore says they're No. 3 behind MySpace and Bebo. Either way, we're glad they didn't poll the Valley — based on an informal survey of our peers, we probably waste three hours a day on Facebook. [Times Online]
At times, there's nothing more amusing than watching a blogger in the middle of a meltdown. Barry Ritholz, the CEO of stock-research firm Fusion IQ, has apparently been seized by panic over an interesting, but unthreatening, development: Big media companies getting into the business of selling ads for blogs. They've already built up an expensive ad sales force, and often find it difficult to grow traffic on their websites faster than their salespeople can sell it. A natural solution: Approach blogs covering similar topics and offer to sell ads on their sites, sharing the revenue. The Washington Post was one of the first to do so, and now, apparently, Reuters is getting into the game. The part that has Ritholz alarmed, though, is a requirement that the blogs "assign" their traffic to the larger company for purposes of getting counted by Nielsen/NetRatings and ComScore Media Metrix, the two largest Web-traffic research firms. Why does Ritholz find this so alarming — and why is he utterly wrong?
Nielsen/NetRatings (motto: "Awkward name, slightly-less-sketchy results") is reportedly dropping pageviews as their top metric, replacing this standard measure of web traffic with "total time spent" on a site. The upshot? Google.com and YouTube.com could swap places on the list of most popular sites. This is actually a big deal and a good move, for several simple reasons.
