That’s a question Hitwise’s Robin Goad asked earlier this week when he showed that – in the UK – Facebook was now getting one in six page views, or 16.73% of the total.   That puts it in front of Google UK (8.22%), ebay (5.39%) and YouTube (2.64%).

Robin makes his observation by pointing out that Facebook’s UK growth rate is starting to slow.   Just like in the US, where last month, Facebook user rates among 18-44 year olds dropped (but grew among over 45s), Facebook saw a slight dip in its UK page view share last month, which could of course be seasonal due to colleges and Universities breaking up for the year.

Facebook does of course have 500 million worldwide users, hence the question of whether it can realistically grow much more.   And of course, it raises the other question of whether it will really ever be replaced (the same question constantly asked of Google in search)?

An interesting piece over on Flowtown says no, giving various reasons from the fact that a lot of people genuinely use it to manage their online lives, the applications market, and the fact that brands and businesses gravitate to it now almost as a default.

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• Facebook nears saturation point in UK (newstatesman.com)
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The other day journalism professor Jay Rosen had the following to say about a Venture Beat story discussing some Hitwise stats showing that relatively few people get news from Twitter.

The article was given fairly prominent billing as it goes against the grain of Twitter breaking and helping to develop news.

Instead, Venture Beat reported that Hitwise’s figures showed that “the micro-blogging site comes in at No. 39 on a list of where people go for breaking stories. Surprisingly, Facebook is No. 3 — a second victory for the site, following yesterday’s revelation that it has surpassed Google as the most visited web site in the U.S. Google News.”

Good for Facebook, but as Jay Rosen pointed out the Twitter stats are close to meaningless.   Why?  Because most regular Twitter users no longer access Twitter through the web using a client instead.

The figure below shows that 80%+ of users don’t update via the Twitter website – it was a TwitStat snapshot taken at 7am UK time, but it’s consistent with what TwitStat showed during the day yesterday (and peak US log-in times).

It also tallies in with figures published in Tech Crunch 1+ year ago, which showed web access at 32% – and in the past year the Twitter market has both matured more, Twitter clients themselves have become better known, and smartphone usage has increased.

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Quite a long post this, it forms the basis of this week’s Cow Digital Digest (subscribe here), the summary of stats and trends that Louise and myself send out every week.

28% of Americans say that social media has influenced their holiday purchases

Metrics firm Comscore (source Marketing Charts) carried out a study to show that during the first 36 days of the Christmas shopping season in the US, during which consumers spent $16 billion, 28% were influenced by social media when buying. The biggest source of influence we reading a consumer generated review of a product (including blog posts) at 13%.

At the same time, the effectiveness of using Twitter feeds to blast out special offers and promotions could be called into question from the stat that only 5% bought after following a company’s Twitter feed to find out about special deals.

“Cyber Monday” (UK) moves closer to Christmas
According to Hitwise, ‘Cyber Monday’, the day when online retailers are at their busiest, moved a week closer to Christmas this year. In 2008 it was on 30 November / 1 December, this year it shifted to 7 / 8 December.

Hitwise says that larger online retailers and department stores were the main beneficiaries of later Christmas shopping. Amazon in particular saw its market share of visits increase from 6.1 to 8.2%. M&S and John Lewis similarly featured in the top ten.

According to Hitwise analyst Robin Goad, the trend towards established brands and also ones with a high street presence “clearly illustrates a preference for multiple delivery and dispatch options.” In other words, we’re tending towards retailers that offer a mixture of trust and convenience.

Last week it was rumoured that Amazon is eyeing up High Street locations around the UK, at a time when Borders books has gone into administration.

Latest Facebook stats for Europe
Inside Facebook has the latest Facebook figures for November, showing that in Europe it now reaches 112 million monthly active users. As before, the UK is by far Facebook’s biggest market with 23,009.220 users, which gives it 37.6% penetration.

Inside Facebook points out the social network’s growth rate is however slowing. This comes as Facebook announced 350 million users globally, which raises the question of whether it’s reaching saturation levels.

4/5 video viewers leave a stream if it “buffers”
Better make sure your site and stream has the right bandwidth as if there is any kind of glitch, the vast majority of users will leave.

Tubemogul looked at 192 million video streams (source New Tee Vee) across 14 days and found that more than 81% of viewers will leave if it “rebutters.” In other words, most viewers won’t hang around for a video to reload but will go and find something else to do with their time.

According to Tubemogul, that’s particularly significant for advertisers who’ve invested in ‘post rolls’, ads that run at an end of a clip. Chances are most people will never see them.

A day in the life of the Internet
This killer graphic was featured on NextWeb, visualising a day in the life of the Internet. Apparently we send 210 billion emails a day, post five million tweets and post 900,000 new blog articles.

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Search engines make you smarter, so say researchers from Penn State University (via Science Daily).    Well…kind of.   But they don’t make you stupid as Nicholas Carr claimed in his seminal Atlantic Magazine article last year.

Researchers looked at search habits of 72 participants engaging in 426 tasks.   Rather than search being used to find out new stuff, search engines were “primarily used for fact checking users’ own internal knowledge.”   According to the academics, that means that search is actually part of our own internal learning process.

Hence the fears about students for example getting lazy and just using Google rather than their brains to find out answers might be incorrect.  Instead, Google, Bing et al support “higher level information needs”, i.e to increase the chances that we get the right answer and to put detail on things we already know.

That makes sense if you look at how search habits are evolving, in particular lengthening.   Last week Hitwise’s Asia-Pacific analyst Alan Long put out a post on lengthening search terms.   Something that Hitwise says is an international trend – one and two word searches have gone down over the past three years and 3+ word searches have gone up.

People already have a fair idea of what they are after when they go to search, hence more specific searches.  As a result, search is as much to validate and build on existing knowledge as to find new one.

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The latest stats about the growth of online video from Hitwise. 1 in 35 UK web visits is now to a video site, compared to 1 in 50 a year ago.