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Is Facebook becoming The Internet?

I read a couple of items tonight that helped bring into sharp focus the sheer magnitude of Facebook's market influence.

First, some data and insights from a talk given by NYU professor Scott Galloway :
  • Facebook now accounts for 10% of all time spent on the internet.  More people around the world spend more time on Facebook that any other site.
  • "People are leaving the internet and spending more time on social media platforms.  There's an emerging generation for which Facebook is their OS.  They don't leave it all day."
  • Currently, Facebook has 580m users.  If we apply Moore's Law to this we can envision this user group doubling in 18 months to 1 billion – perhaps exceeding 20% of all time spent online.  And as we've witnessed so far, as Facebook gets bigger, it tends to grow even faster.
  • If Facebook were to account for 40%-50% of time spent online, then effectively Facebook has become the internet.
Then there's this factoid from today's Wall Street Journal: In February, more than one-third of all online display ads in the U.S. appeared on Facebook – more than 3x Yahoo, its closest rival.

Perhaps this is why I chuckle every time I receive an email from classmates.com.