YouTube has already sped ahead of Facebook to become the second most popular website on a global scale, and now, according to a study from SimilarWeb, Facebook faces the same fate on its home turf in the near future. The study found that Facebook’s traffic in the past two years has gone down from 8.5 billion visits per month to 4.7 billion, representing a drop of 3.8 billion. YouTube, meanwhile, has seen vast increases in both visits and the viewership stemming from those visits. This move on the charts, if and when it happens, will put two Google sites side by side, with Google in first with views per month well into the double digit billions, and YouTube just below it.
Speaking strictly in the US market, YouTube and Facebook’s fierce competition is happening right above Yahoo’s head, but the web giant may soon lose that spot to Amazon. The ecommerce website already beats Yahoo during some of its busiest times, and that may be the case on a regular basis in the near future, according to trends projected from SimilarWeb’s study. Worldwide, Yahoo sits in fifth place, sandwiched between Baidu up above and Instagram down below. Amazon, meanwhile, has spot number thirteen, leaving Russian search engine Yandex in the dust to sit just below US-based adult site PornHub.
It should be noted that this study includes app traffic as well, and is therefore influenced by changes to that landscape. Facebook, beset by recent scandals, has been pushing its platform hard with new offerings, and YouTube has been just as busy reforming the YouTube Music service from a music product for diehard YouTube users into something that a casual listener may be interested in. There have also been improvements to the main site and app, and to the YouTube Kids app, traffic for all of which count toward YouTube’s total hits in the study. With all of this being the case, there’s no reason to doubt SimilarWeb’s prediction at this point in time. It is entirely possible, with all the moves that it’s been making in the video and entertainment spaces, that Facebook may have something up its sleeve to escape third place, but there have been no significant announcements in the last few days that would indicate a chance for such a shift.