Reddit Overtakes Facebook to Become Third Most Visited Website in the U.S.

The social media site Reddit has surpassed Facebook, according to Alexa, an organization that ranks websites, possibly signaling a loss of confidence in the site in the wake of recent scandals.

Google is ranked by Alexa as the #1 U.S. site on the Internet, with YouTube at #2 and Reddit at #3, followed by Facebook and Amazon. One interesting metric that Alexa tracks is time on site. Reddit far and away wins in this category, with users spending an average of 15:09 on the site. Compare that to Facebook, where users only linger for about 10.5 minutes.

The dethroning of Facebook, which had previously held the #2 position at Alexa, is a blow to the company, which has been plagued by scandals in recent months related to their data practices, including the unauthorized sharing of user data by third-party app developer Cambridge Analytica.

Alexa’s ranking is based on “a combined measure of Unique Visitors and Pageviews” over a three-month period, according to the site.

Other ranking sites use different metrics and therefore results can vary from site to site. Quantcast measures “the number of people in the United States who visit each site within a month.” Their ratings are based on a combination of verified and estimated data. Quantcast is more heavily weighted toward unique visitors, so the rankings are much more fluid, often fluctuating wildly when there’s been a spike from a major driver of referral traffic (Drudge, Yahoo, etc.) and thus, unique visitors. SimilarWeb is less forthcoming about what they’re measuring, but according to this post at Quora, “rankings are determined by traffic — monthly visits (non-unique).”

Quantcast puts Reddit in 10th place, with Google and Facebook leading the pack in the first and second spots. According to Quantcast, Reddit has 76 million “monthly people.” Facebook far surpasses Reddit in that metric with 262 million monthly people.

SimilarWeb shows Facebook at #3 on the U.S. Internet, with 22.77 billion total visits. Reddit is ranked at #12, with 1.51 billion visits.