Is Facebook bleeding the blogosphere?

While some twits (ie. twitter users!) are wondering if the blogosphere is on holiday Adam Green is asking a similar question when analyzing Grazr stats -

"Something strange is showing up in our internal stats. The traffic on our website is going up, and the number of pages that display the widget is going up, but over the last few weeks the number of times the widget is loaded on other people’s pages is going down. The number of unique users loading the widget is also going down. Widget loads and unique users are surrogates for overall traffic in the blogosphere. They track how many times other people’s pages are loaded. If they are going down, then traffic on a wide range of Web pages is going down.

It could just be a seasonal phenomenon, but it could also be the result of Facebook pulling people away from their traditional traffic patterns. Once we launch our Facebook app we’ll have a surrogate for Facebook traffic. Then we can see if it goes up while the rest of the blogosphere goes down. The Web never seemed zero-sum before. Maybe that will change."

Comments

[Bernie Goldbach]

Thanks for sharing this hard evidence. Since many of us try to fit our work days into no more than 12 hours, any new shiny thing will take time away from other, more established routines. I think many bloggers, led by an A-List contingent, have sliced up some time for Facebook on a daily basis. That means they have squeezed the time they spend writing and they may actually be spending a higher percentage of their time reading the web through their news aggregators.

I think Grazr will score big numbers with release of a Facebook application. It will enjoy the results of a positive viral effect.