Following this week’s ‘s announcement that Facebook will acquire Friendfeed, we wanted to share a few stats from the US (Robin posted UK stats earlier this week). First, let’s put the size of the two sites in context. Facebook ranked #2 among All Categories of websites last week (behind Google) and was #1 among Social Networks and Forums. Friendfeed by contrast ranked #9010 among All Categories and #421 among Social Networks and Forums.
The deal is being hailed as a breakthrough for Facebook in the battle against Google as the acquisition provides it with a leader in real-time search. Analysis of Friendfeed’s clickstream data reveals that content sites are popular among Friendfeed users. Last week, 22% of downstream visits from Friendfeed went to Social Networks and Forums, 18% to Entertainment, 9% to News and Media, 8% to Search Engines, and 7% to Business and Finance.
A comparison with Google and Twitter’s downstream traffic reveals, as one might expect, that Friendfeed’s clickstream profile is much more similar to Twitter than to Google. Social Networks, Entertainment, News and Media, Search Engines, and Lifestyle websites are popular among downtream categories for both Twitter and Friendfeed. Google’s traffic is more concentrated to Shopping & Classifieds, Business and Finance and Education (Wikipedia in particular).
Friendfeed is currently receiving much more traffic from Facebook than it sends back. Last week, the top referrer of visits to Friedfeed was Google, accounting for 21.03% of upstream visits followed by Facebook with 9.60% of visits. Looking downstream, Facebook ranked #4, receiving only 4.69% of Friendfeed’s downstream visits, behind Twitter, Google and Picassa Web Albums.
The last thing I want to mention is the DMA of visitors to Facebook and Friendfeed. Interestingly, while Facebook draws its strength from major urban centers (NY, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston), Friendfeed, draws its strength from LA and smaller urban centers. LA accounts for 29% of the site’s visits in the past four weeks and the next most highly ranked DMA were Raleigh, Santa Barbara and San Diego.
We look forward to watching this story develop.