There are plenty of headlines today about a study showing people are spending 699 percent more time on Facebook this year. The only problem is that’s not the point the study is making.

The figures come from Nielsen Online, the Web division of the company best known for producing U.S. TV ratings. They show a 699 percent rise in the time people spend on Facebook, along with a 3,712 percent rise in time spent on Twitter. That’s led to stories suggesting individual users are getting more addicted to the sites, for example thanks to fads such as the Facebook ‘25 things about me’ lists.

But the figures don’t actually tell us anything about how long the average user spends on a site. The percentages (along with the raw numbers, which haven’t had as much publicity) relate to the total number of minutes spent on the site by all users. Specifically, Facebook had 13.8 million minutes during April while Twitter had a sliver under 300,000.

The figures tell us virtually nothing because they aren’t accompanied by details of how many people use the sites compared with last year. The growth in total time could be down entirely to new users. It could be that there are no new users whatsoever, but existing users are spending eight times as long on the site. The truth lies somewhere in between, but we have no real idea whatsoever.

The statistics do give some insight into general comparative trends between different websites (though the extent of those trends is difficult to measure, for the same reasons). They back what many of us will have suspected from personal experience: Facebook is now clearly established as the number one site, MySpace is in decline but still a strong second, and Twitter is a substantial distance behind but growing rapidly.

As Jon Gibs of Nielsen says, “The one thing that is clear about social networking is that regardless of how fast a site is  growing or how big it is, it can quickly fall out of favor with consumers.”

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 12:59 pm under Social Media, Web2.0.

Read more entries by John Lister.
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