Facebook Gets More Online Time Than Google, Takes First Place

According to a new comScore study, Web surfers spent about 41.1 million minutes on Facebook during the month of August, roughly equivalent to 9.9-percent of all time spent online. That total put the social network slightly ahead of Google, where, last month, users spent 39.8 million minutes (or 9.6-percent of their time). After being leapfrogged by Facebook during the month of July, Yahoo! remained in third place, with users spending 37.1 million minutes, or 9.1-percent of their time, on Yahoo!-affiliated sites.

What makes Facebook's achievement especially impressive, though, is the fact that comScore counted all of Google's services (including YouTube, Gmail and Google News) when calculating its total. The singular social network, however, still managed to take up more of our time than Google's entire stable of services. In August of 2007, for example, Internet users spent just 2-percent of their time on Facebook, and only 5-percent during August of last year -- roughly equivalent to Google's share. Yahoo!, meanwhile, continues to decline. After capturing 12-percent of user time in 2007 and 2009, the site has gradually taken a back seat to the online equivalents of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.

As NPR points out, the study's findings are based on an aggregation of panel reports from just 2 million users, as well as data from site servers, so there may be some margin of error in comScore's estimates. Statistical uncertainty aside, however, this kind of information will certainly come in handy for online advertisers eager to place their products on well-established, time-wasting platforms like Facebook.

Tags: advertising, facebook, google, online, SearchEngines, SocialNetworking, study, survey, time, Yahoo