Social media responsible for one third of web traffic in Malaysia

Malaysians are officially social media addicts according to comScore who found that social networks accounted for one third of the time spent online in the country in August.

Facebook was unsurprisingly top of the social network list with 9.9 million unique visitors, however Google beat it into second place on the list of most visited sites in the country.

The top ten Malaysian websites includes sites from Yahoo and Microsoft, Wikimedia (publisher of Wikipedia), blogging platform WordPress and local selling site Mudah.my, whose 2.5 million visitors made it the most popular local site.

Compared to social media sites which account for one third of web traffic , entertainment web content (11.5%) and portals (11%) were the next most popular Internet destinations. Other communications types instant messenger (5.3%) and web-based email (4.2%) ranked at the lower end of the scale.

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comScore’s data does not include all internet sessions however, as it counts only those from home or work locations. As we’ve mentioned before, this compromises its reliability as many Asians go online at Internet cafes and through mobile devices.

Despite that, there is value in the conclusions although it is important to bear in mind that the viewer figures do not include every Internet session in the country.

Interestingly, Facebook is listed as the country’s second most watched video content site. Though YouTube occupied the top spot with almost 9 million unique visitors from the country, Facebook notched 4.1 million video viewers – which is impressive considering it isn’t a video specialist.

It will be interesting to observe how Facebook’s video viewing progresses in Asia where the social network continues to grow steadily. Coupled with growing access from mobile devices, Asians are sharing video content over the platform at increasing rates.

While it is unlikely to trouble YouTube as the primary video site on the Internet, Facebook’s video viewing time is likely to continue to soar as its membership expands in Asia, where more people are gaining access to the mobile web and the videoing capabilities of a smartphone.