Popularity can mean the difference between sitting at home on a Saturday night instead of being out painting the town red (in the old fashioned sense, not the Banksy sense of course). But it seems that statistics collected by Hitwise show that it is now more popular to sit at home on a Saturday night at your computer hanging out on social networking sites than to be using a search engine, presumably looking for something else to do. Quite contrary.
Courtesy of Hitwise
The graph shows that during May 2010, for the first time in the UK, social networking accounted for a larger percentage of internet usage than search engines. While the tiny percentage gap may not alarm the likes of Google and Yahoo, but if this trend continues they may need to change their strategy in the UK. But what is it about the UK which makes us a nation of social network lovers? Maybe it’s the voyeuristic nature of being able to keep tabs on all of your contacts and see what they are doing and thinking at any given moment, as long as they have their profile updated. Or maybe it’s because they have become so well engineered to be an easy hub for all your internet usage to spin off. Certainly social networking is a powerful marketing tool and has become a portal for everyone from Pat Sharp to Barack Obama to keep their face in with the in-crowd, but for it to outstrip search engines as the most visited site is quite a coup. Are we just less interested in the world around us and more interested in seeing each other’s Farmville farm? Or has social networking been what we have been looking for all along and now that we have this medium, what better thing is there to search for?
However, when the stats are broken down into individual websites, Google wins:
Courtesy of Hitwise
Google UK was the most visited site in the UK in May with Facebook just over 2% behind. And with Google by far the most popular search engine, maybe these stats just stand to prove that Google is dominating in every other statistical area.
With all this in mind, Yahoo’s ever tightening bond with Facebook seems like a particularly shrewd move for both of them, and may well give Google something to think about. If everyone that used Facebook stopped using Google and just used Yahoo, what would that do to the stats? Yahoo may well be in the cool gang soon enough.
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