facebook explodes to 3% reach. why is more inevitable?
Perhaps on the back of the Newsweek cover story, FB just burst up to 2.98% reach on Alexa, so will be at 3% imminently. It took 3 months from mid-march to climb from 1% to 2%, and less than 2 months to jump to 3%.
The pageviews graph shows even more impressive results, with a 4 month climb from 0.5% of internet traffic to 1%, followed by the jump of almost 0.5% in the last 6 weeks. Incredible: according to alexa, facebook is serving 50% more pageviews now than it was 2 months ago, shortly after their api launch. apps.facebook.com is now contributing 5% of pageviews, and 300 applications have over 25K members.
Fred Stutzman reported on Comscore’s analysis of social network growth rates, noting that total unique visitors shows 270% growth for FB between jun ‘06 and ‘07, up to 54 million visits, a rate roughly 3x greater than the competition, with almost 70% of this in the most profitable north american demographic. Much of this with older members, as Business Week discusses, where a tremendous potential for growth obviously remains.
My prediction 2 months ago that FB would supercede myspace within a year is one-quarter achieved as FB rapidly closes the gap, with “reach” growth even more rapid than my chosen metric of pageviews. Since 50% of all FB users visit the site daily, according to company statements, this reach growth is a powerful forward indicator of pageviews. Alexa now ranks FB 8th in the world over the prior week. hi5 is keeping up with its latin american storm, but i see them as another myspace for a different demographic, and couldn’t contemplate betting on them over facebook.
The true tipping point will come when other major websites feel compelled to create facebook applications, just as they felt in 2000 a need to make a website. We are 6-9 months away, and other major social networks will actually contribute to the inevitable pressure by encouraging those apps to build for their networks as well.
The latest rumors postpone an IPO out to two years. If so, general market pressure would be the culprit, and FB would be waiting for conditions to support a huge new market cap after this current mortagage/debt recession weakens, just as google 2004 IPO showed the web 1.0 bust was well past. Having zero insider knowledge at this point, I still predict an IPO in 2008, after a few explosive revenue deals (showcasing its demographic and rich data uniqueness) and its position in the public mind within the same tier as myspace and google secured.
