Exodus: Facebook Could Drop from 2nd to 3rd Largest Website in U.S.

Following months of scandals and bad news, Facebook could soon lose its spot as the second largest website in the U.S. to YouTube, in what analysts describe as a “paradigm shift.”

Facebook has faced a number of issues in the past few months, including one of the biggest share price drops in Wall Street History, shareholders attempting to oust CEO Mark Zuckerberg as chairman of the board, more questions surrounding election interference, and finally the banning of Infowars and Alex Jones from its platform has led to the social media Masters of the Universe facing criticism from multiple groups. It now seems that Facebook may be about to lose its status as the second most popular website in the United States.

According to SimilarWeb, Facebook is about to be surpassed by YouTube as the second most popular website in America. SimilarWeb’s Stephen Kraus described this as a “paradigm shift,” stating that his projections show that within the next two or three months “YouTube’s traffic will pull ahead of Facebook.” In 2016, Facebook was seeing a monthly visit figure of around 8.5 billion, but by July of this year, that traffic had dropped to approximately 4.7 billion monthly visitors. YouTube has actually been increasing its monthly users, reaching 4.5 billion last month.

SimilarWeb shows the top 5 websites by traffic in the chart below:

Facebook’s U.S. and Canada monthly active users remained at a flat 241 million in July, losing almost a million users in Europe where monthly active users reached approximately 376 million. However, despite a decline in the use of Facebook’s website, the company’s network of platforms including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger is expanding. Use of the Facebook mobile app is also on the rise. “This transition reflects how Facebook is focused, not just on growth for their main site, but rather on expanding their entire ecosystem,” SimilarWeb stated. According to Facebook, 2.5 billion people — a third of the world’s population — now use its products each month.

Google remains the most popular website in the U.S. with 15.2 billion monthly visits, but Amazon is beginning to creep ahead of Yahoo partly due to the success of Amazon’s “Prime Day,” in which items are heavily discounted for a single day a year. SimilarWeb stated: “If current trends continue, Amazon will soon begin generating more traffic than Yahoo on a regular basis.”