Facebook Continues To Dominate Social Logins, Expands Lead To 61% Market Share

Facebook has long been the dominant player in social logins and it continues to expand its lead, according to the latest data from identity management platform Gigya.
For the first time since 2011, Facebook surpassed the 60 percent mark and powered 61 percent of all social logins on Gigya’s network in the last quarter of 2014 (up from 58 percent in the previous quarter and up 10 percent from a year ago).

For the most part, Facebook is taking market share away from Google at this point. Google’s overall share on Gigya’s network dropped from 24 percent in the third quarter of 2014 to 22 percent in the last quarter.
On mobile, Facebook’s dominance is even more pronounced. There, it owns 77 percent of all social logins, up from 62 percent in the previous quarter. All of those gains came at the expense of Google, which dropped from 28 percent to only 16 percent.

Facebook is pretty much dominant across all business segments. It powers 72 percent of social logins on e-commerce sites, for example, and 76 percent on education and non-profit sites. The one small exception is media sites, where it “only” has a 55 percent market share. That’s not a bright spot for Google either, though, as it only owns about 21 percent of that market, too, while Twitter and Yahoo are relatively popular with 11 percent and 8 percent market share, respectively.
I asked Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer how he explains this trend. “We’re seeing that Facebook’s line-by-line controls for Facebook Login are making a big difference for how consumers interact with Facebook as an identity provider,” he told me. “While the difference was most pronounced on mobile in Q4 2014, we’re seeing an overall trend that Facebook continues to make progress in the war for identity.”

Looking ahead, he also believes Apple’s Touch ID could become a major threat to existing log-in providers. “If it gets traction with developers as an authentication mechanism on mobile apps, it could really start to eat Facebook’s lunch in identity.”

Yahoo, by the way, saw the largest drop. Yahoo once accounted for 18 percent of all logins and is now down to 6 percent — on par with Twitter’s social log-in numbers, which have grown slowly over the last year.