Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Facebook, YouTube, our collective time sinks (stats)

Down the drainThink what you will about Facebook, but the main social network of choice today has become so big and so prevalent that there’s no escaping it. And we spend an almost ridiculous amount of time on Facebook. Another behemoth that is virtually everywhere and used by everyone is YouTube. You may have heard of it.

Let us walk you through some numbers for these two sites to give you an idea of how much they are being used worldwide and the massive amount of time we are spending on them.

(Small note: With “users” in this article we mean the number of unique visitors per month.)

Facebook

FacebookFacebook now has 600 million users worldwide, generating an estimated 770 billion page views each month. (So you know those Facebook engineers have their work cut out for them to keep the site running smoothly.)

The average Facebook user visits the site 40 times per month, spending an average of 23 minutes (23:20 to be precise) on each visit. How much time spent on Facebook does that add up to for us all?

Each user spends an average 15 hours and 33 minutes on Facebook in a month.

Together, we spend a whopping 9.3 billion hours on Facebook in a month. That’s 1,065,449 years.

That’s a lot of user time.

But wait, there’s more! This was just for the Facebook website. It doesn’t include the highly popular Facebook mobile apps, which are used by 200+ million of Facebook’s users.

YouTube

YouTubeYouTube has 490 million users worldwide (unique visitors per month), generating an estimated 92 billion page views each month.

The average YouTube user visits the site 14 times per month, spending an average of 25 minutes on the site each time.

This adds up to 5 hours and 50 minutes per month for the average YouTube user. Not as much as Facebook, but read on…

Together, we spend 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in a month. That’s 326,294 years.

But wait, there’s more! Just as with our Facebook stats above, these numbers were only for the YouTube website. Don’t forget all those embedded YouTube videos that are all over the place, in blogs, viewed on smartphones, etc.

Conclusion, and some local flair

Considering the glue-like stickiness that these sites clearly have, it’s not so strange they have become two of the world’s largest sites, and top dogs in their fields. Facebook has become the dominating social network by an unprecedented margin, and YouTube has a similar hold on online video.

These were worldwide numbers. There are, however, big local differences in what sites people are attracted to.

Case in point, the Brazilians are in love with Google’s social network, Orkut. The Brazilian Orkut site (Orkut.com.br) has 37 million monthly users (compared to 9 million for Facebook). That’s almost half of all Brazilian Internet users. Not only that, they visit the site an average of 60 times per month, spending an average of almost 27 minutes on the site each time. So Brazilian Orkut users spend 26 hours and 40 minutes on the site each month. A dedicated crowd…

And of course, we all have our own personal little time sinks on the Internet. For some it may be cute cats, others peruse Wikipedia for hours, or hang out on discussion forums until they turn blue, read their favorite tech blogs, not to mention how many are addicted to Twitter, and so on.

But hey, that Internet thingy is just a fad anyway.

Data source: We used data from Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner, which shows traffic and visitor estimates for a large number of sites. It should be emphasized that these numbers are estimates.

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Can gzip Compression Really Improve Web Performance?

Last updated: February 26, 2024 The size of the web is slowly growing. Over [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free