Contrary to reports you may have seen, even here on ZDNet, it turns out that Facebook may have not reached the almighty Internet milestone of 1 trillion page views after all.
Google, now with its own social network, which directly rivals Facebook, released data via its DoubleClick advertising service to show approximately 1 trillion page views on Facebook during the month of June.
Yet comScore, a world leading and highly-respected research and intelligence firm, released contradictory figures to those by DoubleClick.
Still blasting away the competition, notably Google, YouTube and Twitter, the world’s largest social network only reached 467 billion page views for the following month.
In short, it falls down to the different research methods used to collect the valuable data. Measuring website metrics is an inexact science, as CNN notes.
But which is the better source for reliable data – comScore or Google?
DoubleClick incorporates directly measured traffic from Google Analytics, the website statistics program used by webmasters around the world to measure traffic and other data, including aggregated data from Google’s other programs, such as Toolbar and other third-party research.
comScore, however, measures its data based on a network of over two million users worldwide, who send in anonymously recorded traffic, and additional data collected from over one million domains.
While comScore maintained that Facebook was the most visited site, it added that Google came in second place with just over 260 billion page views.
Facebook did not comment on the statistics, except reiterating that the social network has “over 750 million active users per month”.
Google became the first web property to exceed 1 billion unique visitors globally in May this year, with Microsoft following in second place at 905 million visitors.
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