After a catastrophic few weeks, Facebook could now lose its place as America's 2nd biggest website in a 'paradigm shift'

The biggest share price nosedive in Wall Street history, a shareholder revolt , another round of election meddling , and the banning of a notorious conspiracy theorist only after a rival had acted. It's been a cataclysmic couple of weeks for Facebook.

And, according to a study by SimilarWeb, the news is not about to get any better. In a blog published on Wednesday , the market research firm said it thinks Facebook is about to lose its place as the second biggest website in America to YouTube.

In what SimilarWeb's Stephen Kraus described as a "paradigm shift," he said his projections suggest that "YouTube's traffic will pull ahead of Facebook" in the next two or three months.

Facebook's monthly visits have fallen from 8.5 billion two years ago to 4.7 billion in July, while YouTube has been quietly edging up, hitting 4.5 billion last month. You can see the trend in SimilarWeb's chart below.

SimilarWeb

There were signs of flattening in Facebook's second-quarter earnings in July , when it revealed that overall monthly active users were flat at 241 million in the US and Canada. It also lost a million users in Europe, where MAUs stood at 376 million in the three months to the end of June.

But SimilarWeb said Facebook's losses over the past two years must be seen in context. While the main website might be shedding traffic, Facebook's network, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, is actually growing. Use of the Facebook app is also increasing.

"This transition reflects how Facebook is focused, not just on growth for their main site, but rather on expanding their entire ecosystem," SimilarWeb said. As Facebook noted in its earnings , 2.5 billion people — a third of the world's population — now use at least one of its products each month.

YouTube, meanwhile, has established itself as the "primary entertainment/information source for the younger generation" and benefited from a "growing openness among consumers" to video.

Google remains comfortably the biggest website in the US, with 15.2 billion monthly visits. There's no danger of Facebook or YouTube knocking the search engine off its lofty perch anytime soon.

But another interesting trend SimilarWeb spotted was Amazon creeping ahead of Yahoo, in large part down to the success of Prime Day. "If current trends continue, Amazon will soon begin generating more traffic than Yahoo on a regular basis," the market research company added.