Facebook Steamrolls MySpace in December

Written by Steve Donohue

Friday, January 23. 2009 at 11:00 AM EST 1 comment

Digg   Del.icio.us   Reddit   Email This

• Login to Rate

Dealing another blow to social networking rival MySpace, Facebook racked up 221.8 million unique visitors worldwide in December, making it the seventh most popular Web property on the globe, according to comScore Inc. stats released today.

ComScore, which said the worldwide Internet audience surpassed 1 billion for the first time last month, ranked MySpace parent Fox Interactive Media as the tenth most popular Web property, with 172.8 million unique visitors in December.

After beating MySpace for the first time last April, Facebook continues to steadily increase traffic. The social networking site trails only eBay (240.9 million visitors in December); Wikipedia (273 million); AOL (273 million); Yahoo (562.6 million); Microsoft (646.9 million); and Google (776 million) in monthly unique visitors.

CBS Interactive, thanks in part to its $1.8 billion acquisition last year of CNET Networks, also posted big numbers last month, drawing 178.9 million unique visitors. That gave CBS a 17.7 percent share of global Internet traffic, according to comScore.

Worldwide traffic wouldn’t have come close to surpassing 1 billion unique visitors in December if it weren’t for Web surfers in Asia/Pacific countries, which accounted for 41.3 percent of worldwide traffic.

The 282.7 million Web surfers in Europe that browsed the Web last month gave that continent a 28 percent share of global Internet traffic, topping North America (18.4%), Latin America (7.4%), and the Middle East and Africa (4.8%), comScore said.

China’s practice of censoring Web content didn’t stop it from leading all countries in Internet traffic last month, generating 179.7 million unique visitors for a 17.8 percent share of the worldwide Internet audience. The United States ranked second, posting 163.3 million unique visitors and a 16.2 percent share of the Internet audience. It was followed by Japan (6.0%), Germany (3.7%), the United Kingdom (3.6%), France (3.4), India (3.2%), and Russia (2.9%), according to comScore.