ComScore: 2012 Digital Trends Report: Facebook accounts for 83% of online time

The share of online time spent on major social networking sites in the United States in December 2012

On February 15 , 2012 , market research company ComScore released a digital trend report pointing out that Facebook is still the most popular social networking site, accounting for 83% of the online time on social networking sites.

According to ComScore's analysis data, Facebook was still the most popular social networking site for American users in December 2012, with users' online time accounting for 10.8% of the total time spent online that month. ComScore's survey found that although Google's websites had the largest number of American visitors in December last year, reaching 191.4 million, Facebook still had the most attention. The online time of users of all Google's websites accounted for 10%, slightly lower than Facebook. In addition, Facebook's social networking site accounted for as high as 83% of the total online time.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

No other social network can compare to Facebook in terms of attention. In December last year, Tumblr, which ranked second, had only 6% of online time on social networks, while Pinterest and Twitter both had less than 2%. It should be noted that ComScore's statistics only include desktop applications, and do not take into account the time and traffic of mobile applications.

Competition between Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram is fierce. All three social networks saw rapid growth in U.S. unique visitors between December 2011 and December 2012, and now all three have similar unique visitors. ComScore calls this interesting trend the rise of the "visual web," as these sites all offer image-centric services.

Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram unique user growth trend chart

Tumblr is the leader among these new social networking sites, with U.S. visitor numbers increasing 64% year-on-year to 30.8 million in December. According to ComScore data, Pinterest and Facebook's Instagram both saw U.S. visitor numbers increase 284% year-on-year in December, with Pinterest's 28.9 million visitors slightly ahead of Instagram's 27.4 million.