• Advertising Age, Tuesday, March 10, 2009 11:45 AM

Facebook has started to become a bigger source of traffic for certain large Web sites than even Google, according to new data from Hitwise. Given the social networking leader's incredible scale (it now has more than 180 million registered users around the world), it's not surprising that sites receive a lot of referrals, but more referrals than Google? Now, that is "surprising" says Ad Age's Michael Learmonth, particularly because Facebook is a destination site, while Google is the place you go to find your next destination.

Nevertheless, gossip sites like PerezHilton.com and Dlisted, mom site CafeMom, Evite, video site Tagged.com, and even Twitter, all receive more referrals from Facebook than from Google. As Learmonth says, there are some good reasons for this: CafeMom has a Facebook fan page, and users can easily synchronize updates on Facebook and Twitter. It's hard to know why the gossip sites are on the list, however.

Since the beginning of the year, PerezHilton.com has received 8.7% of its visitors from Facebook, compared to 7.6% from Google, according to Hitwise. Meanwhile, TMZ, another wildly popular gossip site, received 12.2% of its traffic from Google, compared to 3.8% from Facebook.

Facebook has also become an important source of referrals for video sites. Traffic from Facebook accounted for 3.3% of visits to video sites in February, up from less than 2% last year, Hitwise says.

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