Tag Archives: Facebook
Facebook May Have the Traffic, But Google Visitors Worth More
Posted on 23. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 
2 Comments
Last week it was announced that Facebook had overtaken Google Search as the most heavily trafficked site on the web. While this does not include Google’s other offerings – only Search – it still means that Facebook is going to be a major competitor against Google in the future. I would expect the companies to be competing on several different fronts and along with Microsoft’s push of Bing with no abandon for how much they spend on marketing Google is beginning to enter a phase where they can expect rivals on all fronts.
Something that many people may not realize is how much every user Google gets to their site that they covet because of how much every single visitor is worth:
Google: $18.44 per unique
AOL: $12
Yahoo: $6
Microsoft: $4.42
Facebook: $3.09
Twitter: $0.62.
So although Facebook has surpassed Google Search, it isn’t exactly a day of reckoning. Google’s revenue in terms of traffic to its sites far outweighs any other web property and Facebook isn’t even close. This is because Facebook doesn’t really have a solid revenue model yet, plus the fact that their users are not interested in creepy ads that take personal data from profiles. Actually, if you think about it, social media on this graph is not doing very well in terms of revenue per user.
Sure, Twitter has yet to really monetize their site, citing that they want to focus on their core business first. But what is their core business? Whatever it is it should probably include making some money. AOL is doing surprisingly well here, because somehow their long standing subscription model that still seems to work, while Microsoft and Yahoo continues to push their portals as media hubs which seem to be doing them well.
And Google? Well, let’s not be surprised here why they want to push Android, Chrome browser and Chrome OS. The more that they do that, the more this number will go up. The resulting gap between them and their competitors will continue to widen, but that’s with the consideration that social media can’t find a way to fight back and find innovative ways to make money on their sites – all while trying not to fall apart like MySpace.
Facebook Overtakes Google in Traffic
Posted on 17. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments
For as long as Google has been around, it has been a very popular site and as long as I can remember it has been the top ranking site in the world. That’s no surprise seeing as how they offer the best search functionality of any engine out there. Most people need a starting point when they are on the web, and search is the way to go for that.
But Facebook has been coming up in Google’s rearview mirror, and according to Hitwise, has overtaken Google as the most heavily trafficked site on the web (albeit slightly). Take a look at the following graph:
You can see that Facebook a year ago was not even close to comparing to Google’s share of traffic. Now the two together combine for over 14% of total web traffic.
But the search engine giant has been eclipsed before. According to Google Blogoscoped, MySpace passed by Google for a time in 2007. I know that’s hard to believe now seeing as how MySpace has been on a path of decline, but this tidbit is interesting to note because many MySpace users have migrated to Facebook, resulting in a slow exodus that has resulted in the traffic trend that we are seeing today.
Keep in mind that this is Facebook versus Google’s main search page, not the plethora of other services that Google offers like Gmail, Maps and Docs. I also wonder how much of a factor the recent introduction of Google’s real time search feature has contributed to the inflow of internet users to Facebook – many of them signing up and becoming regular users of the site.
Chrome 4 Now Natively Supports Greasemonkey
Posted on 02. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
Now that Chrome 4 has been promoted to a stable release, the folks at Google have decided to remind us of the fact that it now natively supports Greasemonkey scripts. Although these are scripts and not full-blown extensions, this allows Chrome to have an even wider variety of features that are able to run in the browser. This was mostly overlooked last week after the stable release was announced because of the promotion of extensions that are now available for all versions of Chrome, which is for Windows, Mac and Linux.
So what is Greasemonkey? It was developed as a Firefox add-in in 2004 and is a utility for using scripts users have created to enhance their browsing experience. Written in Javascript, Chrome’s speedy V8 engine is perfect for this feature because it runs the platform so fast.
Most of the Greasemonkey scripts are small features for websites that can enhance the web experience for a user. For example, many of the scripts that I found on the main site for these, userscripts.org, were for removing ads from sites like Facebook or Windows Live Hotmail. There were also scripts for filling in forms or performing mass actions such as adds or deletes on social networking sites.
We’re going to have to check out some of these scripts before we are able to recommend any of them. If anyone out there has found a useful Greasemonkey script that Chrome users should know about, by all means please let us know by adding a comment. Also, if you have written a Greasemonkey script that may be useful, please drop us a line.
Asana Gets $9 Million in Venture Capital
Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
The Wall Street Journal is reporting in its print edition that two founders of Facebook recently were awarded $9 million in funding for their new venture called Asana. Although this is newsworthy due to the amount of investment, the real kicker is that the pair, Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, are not discussing what exactly their freshly capitalized business will be doing. Our intuition is that the company, which received lead funding from Benchmark Capital with support from Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz, is going to launch a web-only application that is going to help businesses with their productivity.
All jokes aside about these two on a mission to pay back the world for all the lost time workers spend on the job surfing Facebook, Asana and its funding is could likely be a response to the November 19 preview and source code release of Chrome OS , showing off what Google plans to bring to market in 2010. The target customers for Asana’s purported web app will probably be small and midsize businesses that are looking for low cost, flexible software that helps their businesses grow.
Rosenstein, per an interview with Rafe Needleman of CNET said, “We started Asana to change the way people manage information, and speed up work by an order of magnitude.” As well as helping people become, “vastly more productive,”.
Asana, which ironically is a Sanskrit word that refers to something static, will be something that is light and responsive which would fit perfectly with the Chrome mission. We’ll keep an eye on this one and post updates when we learn more about exactly what Asana plans to do and how we think it relates to the Chrome OS.
