Is Facebook The Next Google?

Pulse

oi-suparna-chakraborty Chakaraborthy

By Suparna Chakaraborthy

Wednesday, May 11, 2011, 8:37

Facebook has taken the world by rage since the time of inception and from being a tool to contact friends across the world, Facebook has now grown up to be a major source of traffic to websites, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

According to the research done on 25 top news websites for the first nine months of 2010, Google and Yahoo have constituted to be the major contributors to pageviews and it has also been noticed that the users landed on the home page of the website more than inside pages. Apart from these two major sources which constitute for most of the pageviews for a news website, Facebook is "rapidly becoming a competing driver of traffic," reported the study.

The reason for Facebook being a traffic driving tool for news websites is being reasoned as a change in the user behaviour. The study author explains, that searching news was the user behaviour since several decades but at present with Facebook being the most efficient communicative tool, sharing news has become prevalent. Thus, Facebook becomes the traffic driving tool for websites. Understanding these nuances, now even websites specially the news websites have started using Facebook as promotional tools.

With Facebook growing up to be the traffic driving tool, it is soon coming up to a competitor for Google. Facebook and Google do not divert traffic to each other. Though Google still remains to be one of the major traffic sources, Facebook with it's popularity and growing number of users is resulting in diverting almost the same number of users to the website.