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Facebook Traffic Reaches Peak - Christmas Eve
January 02, 2009
On Christmas Day 2007 Facebook reached a peak in traffic that wasn’t surpassed until July 2008. Traffic reached a new high on Christmas Eve 2008 when Facebook saw its highest ever traffic level - reaching 2.18% of all US Internet visits compared with 1.42% average for November. The site reached a ranking of 5th among All Categories of websites (compared to 8th for November). This represents a 54% increase on 24th December 2008 compared with the average for November and a 53% increase year on year. The following chart illustrates the increase nicely.
We saw a similar pattern in the UK and also with MySpace, the most popular social network in the US. But why? I can't be sure but I have a few guesses. I am hoping that you will chime in with other ideas (and point out the folly with my suggestions).
1. Weather: According to Hitwise Demographics, the top cities (based on DMA or Designated Marketed Areas ) on Facebook are New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia. These cities were all hard hit by the snow storms last week and the poor weather may have kept people inside with little else to do but send holiday greetings to friends.
2. Boredom: The flaw with my first suggestion is that it ignores the fact that Christmas Day was the busiest day for Facebook in 2007 (only one day later than in 2008). Boredom of Facebook members may have been exacerbated by the bad weather with Internet users left with little to do but chat with friends online. I received 5 friend requests last week and many holiday wishes. Maybe people were simply bored while stuck home with family and so escaped to computers to catch up with friends.
3. Holiday Greetings: Finally, the third possibility, and probably the most likely, is that people simply logged on to send holiday greetings to friends. We saw a similar increase in visits to Yahoo! Mail (the biggest web based email provider) and to E-Greetings websites, which supports this theory.
It will be interesting to see if it takes 6 months again for Facebook to beat its Christmas traffic record.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 12:09 PM
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Comments
As a motivation coach, I follow posts that speak of boredom. Yes, students home for the holiday are very bored; hundreds if not thousands of them said so on line every day of the holidays. For young people, interaction with their peers is a chief Element of Interest, which they usually can't continue very well in person over the holidays. Facebook is a get-together, a party, integral to holiday cheer. Sending out a post saying "I'm bored" is a way to say, "I'm available, talk to me." Sort of like "what's your sign?" used to start a conversation when people were gathering at the local pub. Check out more on boredom at my blog: ThePowerOfBoredom.com
Posted by Letitia Sweitzer | January 5, 2009 07:47 PM
Does this overlook the introduction of Facebook Chat and the FB app which wasn't rolled out until the latter part of 2007? I'd guess both could have helped drive significant traffic. In fact, I'd almost say with the addition of those two features comparisons to last year may not exactly be apples to apples. It would be interesting to know if/how the length of status messages has changed with the advent of the iPhone app.
Posted by Steve Trefethen | January 3, 2009 01:40 AM