6 ms·

The Facebook Chart That Freaks Google Out

87 points by donmcc 15y ago

parfe 15y ago
I have trouble understanding why this graph would freak google out. The more time I spend on google sites the less time I'm spending on sites I reached through google ads.
- artursapek 15y ago
  This chart isn't suggesting that more people are clicking on Google ads. Facebook is a direct competitor with Adwords. Besides, the more time you spend on Google sites, the more of Google's ads you're exposed to. The steepness of Facebook's curve is very likely to freak Google out.
  - helpingfriend 15y ago
    Google and Facebook are competing for ad dollars, but different ad dollars. Google has search advertising pretty much locked. Facebook has figured out brand marketing. Google has been trying to crack that nut for years with AdSense, but Facebook's built-in demographics and time on site looks like they figured it out. I think commenter's are right. Time on site won't hurt Google's core ad market.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    The steepness of Facebook's curve is very likely to freak Google out. Facebook looks likely to exceed 200% in just a few years!
    - artursapek 15y ago
      Exacty. Between now and then is when things will really get interesting.
    - pork 15y ago
      Your comment made me laugh, but in seriousness, FB might be causing people to spend more time than they used to online, so that 200% number is, in a certain sense, not implausible.
ashishgandhi 15y ago
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.)
- mchanson 15y ago
  The graph that would be more interesting is a graph of ad sales. Google and Facebook are both fighting for the same marketing budget dollars.
  - jbooth 15y ago
    Sort of. Google ads tend to be conversion-oriented and facebook ads tend to be branding-oriented. PPC vs CPM.
- bocanaut 15y ago
  100% agreed. also fb has so many hits, they´re selling their ads for quite little money. the average amount of hits to get 1$ revenue would be more interesting
- bradleyland 15y ago
  What you explained is a very well known problem in marketing and advertising. It's not enough to be the "thing" the customer is looking for, you have to be there at the time they want to purchase. That is Google's greatest advantage: when you're looking to purchase something, you turn to search, not to social. I see a couple of things happening though: * Not all purchases are customer initiated, and based on the time users are spending on Facebook, they're in a much better position to capitalize on impulse and casual purchases. * I've seen an increase in the number of friends who post "Hey, what phone should I get" and similar questions. This social behavior was commonplace prior to the advent of relevant, usable search. We may see a return to this leveraging of social knowledge for important purchases. Facebook has a significant advantage there. Even with virtually zero effort, Facebook is going to begin to eat in to Google's territory, simply as a result of the sheer volume of eyes on ads. Right now, Facebook is continuing to focus on engaging users. They're digging deep roots in to our lives, and appear to be focusing on partnerships that aren't ad-related right now. These partnerships are also in markets that are inherently social. Music, for example, is a very social product. It makes perfect sense for Facebook to form strong partnerships there. It's difficult to say when (or if) Facebook will focus on general advertising as a revenue stream. They certainly have a product, but I don't know how effective it is. I've seen a fair number of anecdotal write-ups that suggest it doesn't work all that well, but for individuals with a rational, causal mindset, advertising frequently "does not compute", so it's hard to say if there isn't significant bias there.
nostromo 15y ago
According to this line of thinking, Google has spent the past 5 years being freaked out by Yahoo. 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.
- artursapek 15y ago
  According to this line of thinking, Google has spent the past 5 years being freaked out by Yahoo. Not necessarily, I think what is important here is the slope of Facebook's line, not its overall y-value.
holograham 15y ago
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.
- randomdata 15y ago
  Not to mention that Google is in the business of sending you away from their website; hopefully through an ad link. If users are spending more time on Facebook, one could extrapolate that they are spending less time clicking on ads. The exact opposite of what Google wants.
FJim 15y ago
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.
r00fus 15y ago
Considering Facebook and Google are both advertising-funded companies, I don't see what the concern is. Start showing me slope on advertising revenue or momentum with major advertisers and I'll take notice. 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). 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.
pixelpublish 15y ago
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.
freshhawk 15y ago
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. 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. 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. This is how you monetize a free social service.
- esmevane 15y ago
  I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse, here, but would you please clarify where the money is, there?
  - pork 15y ago
    Theoretically, fine-grained targeted advertising is the money. To get to that fine grain, you need lots of Stasi-like data. That's the tough part, unless you're FB. The other half (algorithms) can be continually iterated and improved by throwing math/CS/physics PhDs at the problem.
    - glimcat 15y ago
      Now if only it was easier for said PhDs to get access to said data. Actually, on second thought, that's a bit horrifying.
      - freshhawk 15y ago
        Ad networks, research companies and domain parking companies will kill to get PhD's on staff to do those kind of optimization problems. They pay well but the good ones never stay long as the job is pretty boring for someone with those skills, it's really just a few problems that need to be solved over and over to the 10th decimal place because slight improvements in results mean lot's of real dollars.
notatoad 15y ago
"Note that just a couple of years ago, someone might have thought to include Myspace in here. Remember?" 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).
RobertHubert 15y ago
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!
- itswindy 15y ago
  That's the old Google you're talking about.
klochner 15y ago
It took me a minute to figure out how facebook gained so much traffic without a commensurate decrease in the other sites. My take-away is that facebook has mostly vacuumed up MySpace traffic (which was conveniently omitted from the chart).
astrodust 15y ago
Is it just me, or is a monochrome only chart a really bad way to present this information? It requires effort to decode.
mikeg8 15y ago
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. 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.

87 points by donmcc 15y ago

parfe 15y ago

I have trouble understanding why this graph would freak google out. The more time I spend on google sites the less time I'm spending on sites I reached through google ads.

artursapek 15y ago
This chart isn't suggesting that more people are clicking on Google ads. Facebook is a direct competitor with Adwords. Besides, the more time you spend on Google sites, the more of Google's ads you're exposed to. The steepness of Facebook's curve is very likely to freak Google out.
- helpingfriend 15y ago
  Google and Facebook are competing for ad dollars, but different ad dollars. Google has search advertising pretty much locked. Facebook has figured out brand marketing. Google has been trying to crack that nut for years with AdSense, but Facebook's built-in demographics and time on site looks like they figured it out. I think commenter's are right. Time on site won't hurt Google's core ad market.
- jrockway 15y ago
  The steepness of Facebook's curve is very likely to freak Google out. Facebook looks likely to exceed 200% in just a few years!
  - artursapek 15y ago
    Exacty. Between now and then is when things will really get interesting.
  - pork 15y ago
    Your comment made me laugh, but in seriousness, FB might be causing people to spend more time than they used to online, so that 200% number is, in a certain sense, not implausible.

ashishgandhi 15y ago

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.)

mchanson 15y ago
The graph that would be more interesting is a graph of ad sales. Google and Facebook are both fighting for the same marketing budget dollars.
- jbooth 15y ago
  Sort of. Google ads tend to be conversion-oriented and facebook ads tend to be branding-oriented. PPC vs CPM.
bocanaut 15y ago
100% agreed. also fb has so many hits, they´re selling their ads for quite little money. the average amount of hits to get 1$ revenue would be more interesting
bradleyland 15y ago
What you explained is a very well known problem in marketing and advertising. It's not enough to be the "thing" the customer is looking for, you have to be there at the time they want to purchase. That is Google's greatest advantage: when you're looking to purchase something, you turn to search, not to social. I see a couple of things happening though: * Not all purchases are customer initiated, and based on the time users are spending on Facebook, they're in a much better position to capitalize on impulse and casual purchases. * I've seen an increase in the number of friends who post "Hey, what phone should I get" and similar questions. This social behavior was commonplace prior to the advent of relevant, usable search. We may see a return to this leveraging of social knowledge for important purchases. Facebook has a significant advantage there. Even with virtually zero effort, Facebook is going to begin to eat in to Google's territory, simply as a result of the sheer volume of eyes on ads. Right now, Facebook is continuing to focus on engaging users. They're digging deep roots in to our lives, and appear to be focusing on partnerships that aren't ad-related right now. These partnerships are also in markets that are inherently social. Music, for example, is a very social product. It makes perfect sense for Facebook to form strong partnerships there. It's difficult to say when (or if) Facebook will focus on general advertising as a revenue stream. They certainly have a product, but I don't know how effective it is. I've seen a fair number of anecdotal write-ups that suggest it doesn't work all that well, but for individuals with a rational, causal mindset, advertising frequently "does not compute", so it's hard to say if there isn't significant bias there.

nostromo 15y ago

According to this line of thinking, Google has spent the past 5 years being freaked out by Yahoo. 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.

artursapek 15y ago
According to this line of thinking, Google has spent the past 5 years being freaked out by Yahoo. Not necessarily, I think what is important here is the slope of Facebook's line, not its overall y-value.

holograham 15y ago

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.

randomdata 15y ago
Not to mention that Google is in the business of sending you away from their website; hopefully through an ad link. If users are spending more time on Facebook, one could extrapolate that they are spending less time clicking on ads. The exact opposite of what Google wants.

FJim 15y ago

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.

r00fus 15y ago

Considering Facebook and Google are both advertising-funded companies, I don't see what the concern is. Start showing me slope on advertising revenue or momentum with major advertisers and I'll take notice. 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). 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.

pixelpublish 15y ago

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.

freshhawk 15y ago

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. 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. 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. This is how you monetize a free social service.

esmevane 15y ago
I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse, here, but would you please clarify where the money is, there?
- pork 15y ago
  Theoretically, fine-grained targeted advertising is the money. To get to that fine grain, you need lots of Stasi-like data. That's the tough part, unless you're FB. The other half (algorithms) can be continually iterated and improved by throwing math/CS/physics PhDs at the problem.
  - glimcat 15y ago
    Now if only it was easier for said PhDs to get access to said data. Actually, on second thought, that's a bit horrifying.
    - freshhawk 15y ago
      Ad networks, research companies and domain parking companies will kill to get PhD's on staff to do those kind of optimization problems. They pay well but the good ones never stay long as the job is pretty boring for someone with those skills, it's really just a few problems that need to be solved over and over to the 10th decimal place because slight improvements in results mean lot's of real dollars.

notatoad 15y ago

"Note that just a couple of years ago, someone might have thought to include Myspace in here. Remember?" 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).

RobertHubert 15y ago

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!

itswindy 15y ago
That's the old Google you're talking about.

klochner 15y ago

It took me a minute to figure out how facebook gained so much traffic without a commensurate decrease in the other sites. My take-away is that facebook has mostly vacuumed up MySpace traffic (which was conveniently omitted from the chart).

astrodust 15y ago

Is it just me, or is a monochrome only chart a really bad way to present this information? It requires effort to decode.

mikeg8 15y ago

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. 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.