Facebook Traffic Up 60%Facebook Traffic Up 60%

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Facebook is taking over the Internet, accounting for almost one-fourth of page views and 10% of Internet visits, according to Experian Hitwise.

Between November 2009 and November 2010, the social media site's traffic increased 60%, Experian Hitwise said. Second-place Google lags far behind Facebook: Its eponymous website took in about 7% marketshare, and YouTube took 3% of Internet visits, the information services company said. Combined, Google and YouTube had page views of 11.7%, according to Experian Hitwise. In September, Facebook dislodged Google as the top online destination, according to a ComScore report.

"The market share of page views for Facebook.com was 24.27% last week, 3.8x the volume of the second-ranked website, YouTube.com, with 6.93%," said Heather Dougherty, Experian Hitwise's director of research.

Today, Facebook provides accountholders with more content than YouTube; in fact, the social media site delivered 24.27% of page views compared with YouTube's 6.39%, she said. In addition, Facebook delivers far more content than Google, which provided 4.13% of page views and Yahoo, which gave a mere 0.54% of page views, according to the company's research.

In a virtual world crowded with options, people continue to surge to Facebook, which received 10.28% of visits, Experian Hitwise said. By comparison, 7.21% of visitors spent time on Google and 3.19% went to YouTube, the report found. In addition, 3.12% visited Yahoo Mail and 2.4% clicked on Yahoo, according to Experian Hitwise. Facebook, Google, and YouTube saw the number of visitors increase, but both Yahoo sites experienced a downward trend.

Facebook, which has about 500 million users, and YouTube, which recently announced that users upload 35 hours of video per minute, continue to vie for mindshare and dollars. Twitter, too, disclosed its expectation of reaching 1 billion users.