SEATTLE – U.S. Web surfers
are spending more time socializing on Facebook than searching with
Google, according to new data from researchers at comScore Inc.
In August, people spent a total of 41.1 million
minutes on Facebook, comScore said Thursday, about 9.9 percent of their
Web-surfing minutes for the month. That just barely surpassed the 39.8
million minutes, or 9.6 percent, people spent on all of Google Inc.'s
sites combined, including YouTube, the free Gmail e-mail program, Google news and other content sites.
U.S. Web users spent 37.7 million minutes on Yahoo
Inc. sites, or 9.1 percent of their time, putting Yahoo third in terms
of time spent browsing. In July, Facebook crept past Yahoo for the first
time, according to comScore.
In August of last year, Web surfers spent less than 5
percent of their online time on Facebook, about the same percentage of
their time on Google and almost 12 percent on Yahoo. In August 2007,
Facebook captured less than 2 percent of U.S. surfers' total minutes.
Google accounted for less than 4 percent, and Yahoo for just over 12
percent.
To be sure, there's wiggle room in these estimates,
which comScore bases on a combination of reports from a panel of two
million users around the world and data from websites' servers. But the
time spent posting photos, updating status messages and scrolling
through news from friends has at least grown to rival just about
everything else people do online.