Facebook passed the 500 million visitor mark in the month of April, according to ComScore.
ComScore’s site traffic measurements show Facebook in fourth place with 519 million visits in April. Google was in first place with 921 million users. Microsoft landed in second-place with 728 million and Yahoo came in fourth with 588 million.
ComScore’s site traffic numbers include non-registered site visitors who can view Facebook pages through public profiles.
Facebook has recently seen crititicism over its complex and ever-changing privacy practices as well as new services that share its user data with other social media sites.
The ComScore traffic rankings are from April. The growing controversy over Facebook privacy policies started in May, so it’s possible that the social network could have a slowdown in traffic as a result.
However, traffic data from Hitwise tracks site visitors on a weekly basis and hasn’t recorded a drop in Facebook traffic. Facebook’s US traffic has been growing around 3% per week for the three weeks since the privacy problems hit the news, which is in line with its the weekly traffic growth from earlier this year.
In the past, Facebook’s traffic continued to grow despite privacy concerns.
Continued growth in Facebook’s registered users would support the company claim that people aren’t worried about changes to the privacy policy.
Facebook believes people are using the new social networking features in spite of the privacy criticisms.
Facebook has had world-wide traffic growth of 69% from last year.
Over 75% of Facebook visitors are from outside the U.S.
The U.S. has over 115 million registered Facebook users.
In the past year, Facebook has had its strongest growth rates in Latin America ( 102% ) and Europe ( 74% ).
User growth in the United States is still strong at at 83% since last year.
[ Source: WSJ.com ]