Facebook Projected to Overtake Google

If current projections hold, within 18 months, Facebook will overtake Google to become the most visited website in the world.

In just over six years, Facebook has gone from an upstart social network living in the shadow of MySpace, to the second most trafficked site on the Internet. Within the next 18 months, it might be the biggest website in the world.

According to the website Alexa.com, sometime in early 2012, the social networking website will surpass Google as the top site in the world. If the rate of growth for both companies remains constant, both Facebook and Google will be visited regularly by more than 50 percent of every person on the Internet on a daily basis.

Currently, Google is holding steady at around 150 million unique visitors per day, while Facebook is around 125 million: an increase in 25 million from this time last year. Google is also growing, but has plateaued a bit since hitting 150 million.

Facebook recently hit a milestone when it announced in July that it officially had 500 million active users registered on the site. While the number in general is remarkable for several obvious reasons, of equal note is the growth Facebook has seen, not just in unique visitors per day, but in the number of people that are even now signing up to create accounts. In the last seven months, Facebook has seen a 25-percent increase in the number of registered accounts, from 400 million to 500 million.

Facebook has also seen remarkable growth in its “Facebook pages,” which include both fan pages, as well as corporate pages run by businesses. According to the blog Eyes and Feet, the Facebook fan pages have increased from 4 million to 16 million as more and more business create professional Facebook pages to reach consumers.

Of course these projections don’t factor in things like over saturation, or any potential changes to either site that could raise or lower the traffic to each, but barring unforeseen events, Facebook will soon dominate the internet.