Facebook takes pole position

Hong Kong - New data shows Facebook was the most visited site in Hong Kong during August, outranking local favourites Yahoo and YouTube as the top online portals.

The Hitwise data shows that for the first time Facebook took the top spot with a 5.5% share of all online visits, which is a 694% increase from August 2007.

Following Facebook, Yahoo Hong Kong took 4.97% share for second place with YouTube in third at 2.22%. The top 20 websites received 35% of all internet traffic in August.

While the Hitwise data shows Facebook in pole position, seven of the top 20 websites were Yahoo properties. They included: Yahoo Hong Kong (2nd); Yahoo Mail Hong Kong (4th); Yahoo Hong Kong Search (10th); Yahoo Geocities (12th); Yahoo Auctions Hong Kong (14th); Yahoo Hong Kong News (15th) and Yahoo Mail (20th).

The results however do not indicate why Facebook is number one, but its sheer scale might be just one of many factors. On 26 August Facebook announced it had reached 100 million registered users worldwide.

In the past five months the site has also been adding a string of local languages, which included simplified Chinese.

Other languages around the region include Japanese, Malaysian and Vietnamese.