On a seasonally slow Friday, much is being made over some seasonally slow numbers that comScore released about Facebook and the other top social networks. Actually, we posted about these numbers a couple weeks ago, but focused on the engagement aspect – users spending less time on social networks, versus the unique visitor count, which has essentially been flat since August of last year. At the time, comScore had reported that users on Facebook were spending 10% less time on the site than they had in the same month the prior year.

I think engagement is the more interesting stat to look at, since in the long-term there are only so many users you can acquire, but an infinite amount of ways to make them spend more time on your Web site and load more pages. Compete.com has taken a look at how users (in the US) are engaging with Facebook applications, and while those too saw a slight decline in visitors from December-to-January, page views for them were up 14.6% to a record 1.53 billion. Likewise, pageviews at Facebook on the whole were up 18.3% to 18.3 billion. Here’s the chart:

As we noted in our earlier coverage, according to comScore, Facebook’s year-over-year growth in unique visitors is still up a robust 78.6%. As Allen Stern properly notes, “whatever caused the graph to have the same shape last winter is causing the graph to have that shape again this year.”

What’s actually going on here is users who are on Facebook are spending more time there, and assuming traffic picks up in the same seasonal fashion it did last year, Facebook will be a much stronger web site and in a better position to start generating serious advertising revenue.

And, let us not forget on the whole how inaccurate third-party tracking service can be, which make many of the arguments you read (including this one) worth little more than the digital paper they’re printed on. This just in from a Facebook spokesperson:

“The number of users for Facebook continues to climb in the UK. Our internal monthly active user numbers rose between December and January in the UK and are now at more than 8.3 million. Facebook tracks active monthly users, rather than registered user or unique visitors. Active users reflect those who have used the site in the past 30 days.”

“Active Users” is indeed the right metric to measure performance by, and both the public stats and internal numbers for Facebook tell us that it’s moving in the right direction.

Now, go enjoy your weekend

ShareThis

Popularity: 3% [?]