Based on new data from researchers at comScore Inc., U.S. internet users are spending more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google!
Last month, according to the research, people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook about 9.9 percent of their Web-surfing minutes for August. That just barely surpassed the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 percent, people spent on all of Google Inc.’s sites combined, including YouTube, the free Gmail e-mail program, Google news and other content sites.
On Yahoo Inc. sites, U.S. Web users spent 37.7 million minutes, or 9.1 percent of their time, putting Yahoo third in terms of time spent browsing. A month before that, Facebook crept past Yahoo for the first time, according to comScore researchers.
In August of 2009, US Web surfers spent less than 5 percent of their online time on Facebook, about the same percentage of their time on Google and almost 12 percent on Yahoo. In August 2007, Facebook captured less than 2 percent of U.S. surfers’ total minutes. Google accounted for less than 4 percent, and Yahoo for just over 12 percent.