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Facebook picture out of focus

Speculation about the future of Facebook.com was all over the Web Friday. (Here, here, and here.)

A reporter for Business 2.0 cautioned that traffic to the collegiate and high school networking site was declining. At the same time, a News Corp. executive said he'd be interested in buying FaceBook, but not for the $2 billion price tag Business Week put on the property earlier this week.

Om Malik cited data from ComScore Networks showing the number of unique visitors to Facebook fell by about 2 million, or 16%, from December last year to February this year. By comparison, News Corp.'s  MySpace grew its user base almost 50%, to 37.3 million from 26.7 million. Malik said that if Facebook did receive a buyout offer of $750 million, as Business Week said it had, "The founders of the company would have been prudent" to take it since traffic is dipping. Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, told an investors conference in New York yesterday, "It's a great site and I know the guys there well. We're certainly not paying $2 billion for Facebook." Google Finance

Google Finance starts slow, shows promise

Finance is the dominant business information Web site, according to a report by HitWise Inc., an online analytical service. Reporting on traffic for the week ending March 25, the week Google launched its finance service, Hitwise calculated Yahoo Finance's share at 31.89% of visits. MSN Money was second with 11.98%, followed by the Internal Revenue Service (9.47%), CNN Money (3.83%), and MarketWatch (3.58%), the publisher of this column.

Google Finance ranked 28th and had a market share of .53%. The average time a user spent on a business information site was 8 minutes and 29 seconds during the week, Hitwise said. Google users stayed an average of 6 minutes and 2 seconds, but that increased to 8 minutes and 23 seconds the next week. "While the Google share is small, the rapid ramp in average session time indicates that Google searchers are interacting with this new financial portal offering," said Bill Tancer, general manager of Hitwise.

Blogs, RSS win backing from ad buyers

A survey of people attending last December's Ad:Tech advertising-industry conference found 40% planned to spend marketing dollars to add RSS feeds to clients' or their own Web sites.

In-house blogs were on the list of things to do for 35% of the attendees, while 30% said they intended to put ads on Web logs or blog networks, according to a report by eMarketer.

Advertisers are less convinced about podcasts. A third of them said it will be more than a year before they spend money on the downloadable audio programs, although 14% indicated they would sponsor some podcasts this year.