If you visit Facebook or YouTube during official hours while in the your offices, well – welcome to the club. I do that too. And guess what? It looks like everyone else are doing the same thing as study shows that both Facebook and YouTube are getting heaps of traffic from business sites.
SC Magazine UK is reporting that according to the study made by Network Box, 6.8% of business internet traffic now goes to Facebook. Google sites grabs around 3.4% of all traffic, Yimg (Yahoo’s image server) gets 2.8%, Yahoo 2.4% and DoubleClick 1.7%. These are based on the analysis of 13 billion URLs used by businesses in Q1 2010.
Online video consumption in the workplace is also eating up business bandwith according to the report. YouTube videos is using up 10% of all corporate bandwidth, followed by Facebook taking 4.5% of all bandwidth used. Windows update, Yimg and Google follow with 3.3%, 2.7% and 2.5% respectively.
Network Box internet security analyst said that the findings of their study clearly show that IT administrators have more reason to be concern about the amount of social network use in the workplace.
” There are two real concerns here: firstly that employees will be downloading applications from social networks and putting security at risk; and secondly the amount of corporate bandwidth that appears to be being used for non-corporate activity,” said Herron.
So, if you’re one of us who consistently check Facebook and YouTube while in the office – hope that our bosses won’t read this news. Or if they do and they decide to ban Facebook and YouTube in the workplace, we can always argue that we’re visiting Facebook for “business networking” purposes and YouTube for the sake of occupational learning.
