Coming off my post about Yellowbook’s remark about Facebook being a larger traffic driver than Google there’s this item:
According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites . . .
Using a snapshot of Web traffic from December, Compete’s director of online media and search, Jessica Ong, found that 15 percent of traffic to major Web portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook and MySpace. The lion’s share of that traffic, 13 percent came from Facebook
What the article doesn’t discuss is how the “quality” and purchase intent of that traffic may be quite different on a search engine vs social media. But the volume is undeniable.
Screenwerk 
February 15, 2010 at 9:14 pm
[…] Compete: FB Driving More Traffic than Google « Screenwerk […]
February 16, 2010 at 3:08 am
The other thing that is likely missed is actual “referral” or “directed” traffic. Compete, comScore, etc only identify the sequence of sites visited – they don’t actually identify if the Site A referred a user to Site B via a link. Since user activity on Facebook is so high, it’s not clear that Facebook is actually driving people to Yahoo, AOL or MSN, or it’s just people going from Facebook to check their Yahoo Mail / Hotmail accounts.
Regardless, what seems clear:
– Facebook is driving a lot of traffic across the web
– it’s probably impossible to know exactly how much traffic FB is driving