New reports from The Neilsen Company show that when it comes to keeping visitors on a site…and coming back for more…social networks are the runaway winners. In December 2009, visitors spent an average of 5.5 hours on Facebook and Twitter for the month, up 82% from the previous year. And that number grew to over 7 hours in January 2010.
Here are the top 10 brands on the web, the number of unique visitors and the number of hours spent on site per visitor, for January 2010:
Facebook – 7:01 hours average time on site…116+ million unique visitors
Yahoo! – 2:29 hours average time on site…137+ million unique visitors
AOL Media Network – 2:14 hours average time on site…87+ million unique visitors
MSN/Windows Live/Bing – 1:50 hours average time on site…116+ million unique vistors
Google – 1:26 hours average time on site…153+ million unique visitors
Fox Interactive Media – 1:23 hours average time on site…63+ million unique visitors
Apple – 1:18 hours average time on site…68+ million unique visitors
YouTube – 1:02 hours average time on site…99+ million unique visitors
Microsoft – 41 minutes average time on site…98+ million unique visitors
Wikipedia – 15 minutes average time on site…64+ million unique visitors
While it’s obvious Facebook is the clear winner for visitor time spent on site, how does Facebook compare, in terms of traffic, with the other top social networking sites? Well, here’s a rundown of the numbers from December 2009:
Facebook – 100+ millions unique visitors
MySpace – 50+ million unique visitors
Twitter – 20+ million unique visitors
Classmates – 15+ million unique visitors
LinkedIn – 13+ million unique visitors
I had no idea Classmates had kept its initial vault of visitors in tact over the years. I was also came to know the guys who run and operate Juno and Net Zero also own and operate Classmates.
[sidebar note] been getting your RSS feeds for awhile now Dave and I don’t know how you do it, but your content is fresh and useful, keep up the strong work. – Neil