Facebook accounts for a seventh of UK web traffic

The social-networking site Facebook accounts for an astonishing one in seven internet page views in the UK.

The statistics come courtesy of the latest report from net analytics firm, Hitwise, which shows that Facebook far outstrips even Google in terms of page views.

While Google.co.uk remains the most visited site in this country, Facebook wins hands down in terms of the number of clicks it generates, accounting for 14.5% of all web traffic.

Google.co.uk is second with 5.8% of page views and auction powerhouse eBay is third with 5.5%.

Webmail and social-networking sites dominate the rest of the top 10, with Windows Live Mail (Hotmail), GMail and Yahoo Mail all making an appearance, alongside Bebo.

Twitter, which has rather over-shadowed Facebook in recent months, doesn’t even make the top ten, although that may be because many people access Twitter via dedicated clients rather than through the website itself.

“Although it has fallen somewhat off the media radar in favour of Twitter recently, Facebook remains far and away the most popular social networking website in the UK,” claims Hitwise’s research director, Robin Goad.

“One significant factor is that the site’s growth in the UK doesn’t yet show any signs of slowing. A key measure of success for any social network is average session time; as we have seen with sites such as Friends Reunited and MySpace, when average session times begins to drop off visitor numbers soon follow.

“Facebook has yet to experience this problem: its average visit time increased from 19 minutes 59 seconds in September 2008 to 26 minutes 14 seconds during September 2009.”