Facebook reached a pretty significant milestone yesterday after recently reaching the 500 million users mark. According to market researcher, ComScore, it seems that people are hanging out on Facebook more than they are Google. That means the search engine, YouTube, Gmail and Google News combined. The numbers are even more staggering. ComScore has reported that during the month of August, people spent 41.1 million minutes surfing Facebook, compared to 39.8 million minutes spent on Google’s sites. For Facebook, that’s nearly 10% of the total number of minutes they spend online each month. Yahoo came in a respective third place of total minutes spent at 37.7 million.
However, the comparison from this year to last year is probably the most telling. In August of 2009, ComScore reported that Internet users spent less than 5% of their total monthly minutes on Facebook, about the same amount on Google and almost 12% on Yahoo. With Google’s launch of Instant Google and Yahoo’s merger with Microsoft’s Bing, it will be interesting to see how these numbers shift in the next year. For now, it’s safe to say that Facebook is the big gun and everyone else is just trying to play catch-up.