Facebook Looms as Google's Most Dangerous Rival

(MoneyWatch)  Google's natural rival is Microsoft's Bing and Facebook's is Twitter.

Right? Wrong.

Check out the data, and it becomes evident that that the biggest battle brewing is between Google and Facebook. In terms of the conventional thinking about what Google does -- search -- and what Facebook does -- social -- this means there is a sea change going on in how people find content.

Some recent stats:

• Facebook drives three times as much traffic to broadcast news sites as Google News, according to Heather Hopkins at Hitwise.
• Facebook is the principal driver of traffic to the major portals, according to data from Compete. (Google is still the major traffic driver further down the long tail.)
• People spend far more time on Facebook than they do on any other site, according to January data from Nielsen. Facebook users spend an average of seven hours on the site every month, vs. an hour and 23 minutes for Google, and two hours and nine minutes for Yahoo.

Combine those three disparate facts, and the conclusion is that Facebook user behavior is causing a ripple effect throughout the Web. This also goes a long way toward explaining why Google has been so obsessed with launching its own social net, Google Buzz.

Spending seven hours a month on a site which is devoted to sharing means that site is going to start dominating when it comes to moving the masses all over the Internet. Post a viral video so that your 400 Facebook friends can see it and you get a mushrooming effect that you can't get on Google. Then multiply that by Facebook's user base of 400 million people and you've got a site that is breaking out of just being the leading social network into one that has broad ramifications for the entire Web.

What all this adds up to is that Facebook's growing influence is going to start changing how content and advertising is produced. As it encroaches on territory that used to be Google's, search engine optimization may increasingly be coupled with social networking optimization. At the same time, social-network marketing may become a rival to search engine marketing, and so forth. These are different disciplines, requiring different skills.

In the realm of revenue and other financial measurements, Facebook isn't there yet. The independent Inside Facebook blog is predicting that Facebook will bring in about $1 billion in revenue this year. Google racked up $6.67 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2009 alone. A company called Sharespost, which handles transactions between sellers of privates shares and buyers, put out an estimated valuation of Facebook today of $11.5 billion; Google's market cap is more than $175 billion. (If you're interested, Sharespost also said that Twitter was worth $1.4 billion.)

Still, this trend bears watching. There was a time when Google didn't have a revenue model, either, and Yahoo abandoned its original purpose -- search -- to become a broader portal in search of more revenue. If only it had seen the future ...

Previous coverage of Facebook at BNET Media:

• Facebook's Positive Cash Flow: Social Media Means Business
• Facebook's Click Fraud Scandal Grows with Second Lawsuit