According to a new Nielsen Study, social media platform Facebook saw roughly 2 out of 3 users of the internet in the U.S. access its site in the month of March, 2012, equalling roughly 152 million unique visitors. And, this rate is even higher in Italy, New Zealand and Brazil, where Facebook is dominating Google+. Facebook presently has about 901 million active members, and the following graph breaks it down a bit, in regards to its reach:

Other key stats include:

– In January 2009 Facebook passed Myspace to become the top social network/blog site for the first time, a position it’s held in the U.S. ever since.
– Between 2005 and 2009 Facebook doubled its traffic each year in the U.S., surpassing 10 million uniques for the first time in November 2006 (11.6M).
– Facebook connected friends around the globe quickly: reaching 10 million unique UK visitors by April 2008. In 2009, the French, Spaniards and Germans followed suit, with 10 million visitors apiece in January, May and November, respectively.
– As recently as August 2011, Facebook overtook Orkut as the top social networking site in Brazil; it has continued to grow its audience since then.

A similar Comscore report showed that as of March, Brazil has grown into the world’s 7th largest internet market, with Facebook seeing a relative increase of 86.73% in the past six months. And, I was wondering earlier why Facebook had rolled out its new “Pages Manager” app in New Zealand before the U.S. – Facebook is huge in that country, with 79.8% of its people online checking the site. It would seem that Facebook is indeed becoming the sole reason to pay the internet bill in certain parts of the world.