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Facebook boasts 11 times more page views than MySpace, 59 times more than Twitter

January 5th, 2010 General

Did you ever wonder how busy the servers of the world’s largest social networks are? It turns out it’s very hard work being well loved, especially for the number one player.

According to data from Google, Facebook serves 260 billion page views per month. That’s more than six million page views per minute, or a staggering 37.4 trillion page views in a year. We can securely assume that Facebook’s web servers aren’t getting bored waiting around for work to do.

No wonder Facebook desires as many as 30,000 servers, and they probably keep adding more and more. After all, they’re still on the rise.

Not that the web servers of additional social networks are on a picnic, although they’re on a really different playing field. A few samples:

MySpace: 24 billion page views per month
Chirrup: 4.4 billion page views per month
LinkedIn: 1.9 billion page views per month

If you ever had any doubts that Facebook is king of the hill, at least in terms of sheer site activity, have a look at the chart here not more than that we place together using data from Google Ad Conspirator. These are global numbers.

A few observations on scale:

Facebook has nearly 11 times as many monthly page views as MySpace, which came up second, and 59 times as many as Chirrup.
In turn, Chirrup has more than twice as many monthly page views as LinkedIn.
Digg has twice as many monthly page views as Reddit and more than seven times as many as Slashdot.
Comparing the initially and last on this list, Facebook has 5,778 times as many monthly page views as FriendFeed (which Facebook owns these days anyhow).

There are of course plenty of additional things that can keep servers busy additional than serving web pages, for example streaming music or video, third-party data access via APIs (for example Chirrup apps), etc.

Also, don’t get page views confused with actual visits or user numbers. Having more users makes it more likely that sites have many page views, but there are also additional factors to consider, such the site design itself and the type of service it offers. Some sites encourage exploration more than others, clicking around to different pages. We’re going to have a closer look at this in a shortly post.

But for now, let’s just admire the incredible amount of work being done by these sites, every minute and hour of the day. Being well loved in social media is hard work. No wonder public complain when social arrangement sites have downtime, there are always a ton of public using them.

Note: As always when effective with estimates (which Google and all additional external data collection services do), there will be a margin of error in the numbers.

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Facebook boasts 11 times more page views than MySpace, 59 times more than Chirrup