The comments here and the comments at allthingsD make it clear that many people don't understand how cookies and data collection work which is surprising.<p>Every time you visit a page with any kind of facebook integration (like button or whatever) facebook adds your online behaviour to it's user profile.<p>Ideally, from facebooks perspective, everyone would always be logged in to facebook and all pages would have a like button, then they can track everything everyone does on the web. That's why the stickiness thing is important, not just because active users are less likely to quit.<p>This is how you monetize a free social service.
Yes, people spend a lot of time on FB but how much of it converts to revenue? Google could be converting visitors to revenue faster than what FB could be. Say, I search for a .is domain registrar, I click on the ad which seems to be selling it the cheapest and I leave Google. My short visit was converted to revenue and converted quick. On the other hand, I go to FB not to look for anything specific but only checkout what other people are sharing or share something myself. I think the way I use FB, since I'm not looking for anything specific, I have a lesser inclination towards clicking on a link which is trying to sell me something. Google could show me links to stuff I was looking for making it more likely for me to click on them. (Yes, there are gamers who buy credit but I'm not one of them and not suitable to comment there. But from what I remember, it's not a significant share of FB revenue - but I may remember very old stuff and I would be wrong today.)
According to this line of thinking, Google has spent the past 5 years being freaked out by Yahoo.<p>Of course they haven't. I think Google's Facebook envy has everything to do with the data Facebook is amassing -- not with time spent on their service.
I have trouble understanding why this graph would freak google out.<p>The more time I spend on google sites the less time I'm spending on sites I reached through google ads.
Anyone think about the fact that Google has spent years becoming a minimalist for search effort and user experience, making results faster, more accurate, predict better, and be more painless... In short, they make a users experience and interactions with the site quick, almost transparent. Get in get out! Predict and find my results before I'm even done typing and show me the entire site before hitting "search". Now take other sites, how long does it take to find anything on facebook?... for ever, you have to dig and filter, and look and check... Its painful. I know it does not amount to much more than an observation but all that extra time spent does not reflect usefulness or effort on the users side. Id like to see a CPM comparison chart for popular sites!
"Note that just a couple of years ago, someone might have thought to include Myspace in here. Remember?"<p>and facebook, not being fundamentally different to myspace, could easily be victim to the exact same thing. google, however, is sufficiently diversified to be much more resistant to user fickleness (firefox spellcheck says that's a word).
Stupid chart, huge difference here. Google has the advantage of knowing what a user wants when they are searching for it. Facebook is always pushing ads when users are looking to stalk people's photos.
These comparisons are a bit silly. They do not do the same thing. We should use this graph to compare Google to Yahoo and AOL and see how they fare against their competitors, not how many of their users spend 18 hours on Farmville.
Considering Facebook and Google are both advertising-funded companies, I don't see what the concern is.<p>Start showing me slope on advertising revenue or momentum with major advertisers and I'll take notice.<p>Google's core market (search advertising) just had a new fence put up (Google+), which seems to be doing a good job keeping Facebook from marching right on in (social search advertising).<p>Facebook's ad-market strength is display advertising. This is a much smaller piece of the pie, and they don't completely own it, but they're making inroads. I expect Yahoo/AOL are much more worried about this than Google.
I wonder what would happen if google blacklisted all facebook.com URLs. when I search for things, the first or second link is usually a company or fan FB page and if those were removed from Google's index, I wonder if that would have any affect on this graph.<p>Another thought, FB has become my IM... I spend a majority of time on there chatting, not clicking from page to page so FB's display ad's would be mush less effective to users like myself because the time I spend using there platform to IM is irrelevant/less valuable in relation to google sites.
It took me a minute to figure out how facebook gained so much traffic without a commensurate decrease in the other sites.<p>My take-away is that facebook has mostly vacuumed up MySpace traffic (which was conveniently omitted from the chart).
For the sake of argument lets say time spent on line = revenue. This picture shows us top line numbers. What about costs? I suspect that Google's cost for delivering content is markedly lower than Facebook's.