Facebook's visitor numbers soar

Facebook has seen its number of unique site visitors soar 89 percent in the period between May 2006 and May 2007, according to recent comScore traffic reports. Just over 26 million unique visitors were recorded in May this year.

by Helen Leggatt

Historically, Facebook has been the domain of business colleagues and students from high schools and universities across the U.S. In September, 2006, this ‘exclusivity’ was lifted and Facebook opened its doors to anyone who could provide a valid address and contact details whereas previously a ‘.edu’ email address was required.

The opening up of the social networking site has seen new users flooding to Facebook. The original demographic was somewhat skewed towards the 18-24 year old age group but this is gradually being diluted with huge increases in other age groups. The number of adult users (25-34) has increased 149 percent and the number of younger users (12-17) rose by 181 percent, according to comScore’s recent figures.

“As the overall visitation to Facebook continues to grow, the demographic composition of the site will likely more closely resemble that of the total Internet audience,” said Jack Flanagan, comScore Media Metrix Executive Vice President.

The amount of time each visitor spends on Facebook is up 35 percent, to 186 minutes per month, and the number of page views also increased by 143 percent.

The comScore figures don’t take into account any changes due to Facebook’s opening up of its platform code to advertisers and developers, late in May, 2007. However, HitWise reported that, in the month following the release of the platform to advertisers and developers, Facebook’s site traffic rose 10 percent.