The web has been buzzing over the last few days about Facebook passing MySpace in worldwide traffic recently after the release of new Comscore figures, but did Facebook pass MySpace a while ago?
Google just announced Google Trends for Websites – a new feature of Google Trends that, rather than just looking at search trends, lets you view visitor trends for your favourite websites.
Here’s what the new service shows for Facebook.com and MySpace.com
(Source: Google Trends for Websites)
According to this chart, Facebook passed MySpace for unique visitors in November 2007.
This raises an interesting question – which of these services should we trust? What’s the difference between comScore, Google Trends, Alexa and Compete? How accurate are they?
5 Comments
This is interesting. From my experience one of the most reliable source is Comscore and Google Trends. As for Alexa, the rankings are not accurate at all because it only tracks visits from browsers or users that installed their Alexa toolbar.
Just my 2 cents
Lisa, actually Google Trends is accurate either. Aside from not measuring traffic (unique visitors aren’t the same thing as “traffic”), their results’ accuracy is at least somewhat dependent on whether or not the sites allow Google to access their analytics data, as well as whether or not pages are being indexed in Google (where in this example, each site will have a lot of pages not being indexed).
Woah, I need to proofread! I meant “Google Trends isn’t accurate either.”
Jenn is right – which is part of the problem here. Which metric is the most relevant? On the flip side, perhaps it only matters to those companies, depending on their strategies. Are they looking for the most people or the most traffic? Then again, those companies don’t need to look at Comscore or Google Trends – they have their own analytics (as Jenn rightly points out on her own post on this).
Facebook and Myspace aside, the most interesting thing here for me is which of these tools is most reliable. It would be great to see a side-by-side analysis of the services and sample figures from each of these services so we can compare for ourselves.
Wow – that kind of a level playing field and transparency would be great wouldn’t it? I guess we can hope…
2 Trackbacks
[...] Judy Gombita of PR Conversations forwarded me a link to a post by Dave Fleet, looking at Google Trends statistics for Myspace and Facebook. The chart makes it appear that Facebook is getting more traffic than Myspace, as Dave’s title suggests: Did Facebook Traffic Outgrow Myspace Traffic Last Year? [...]
[...] Read more about this at: DaveFleet.com [...]