It’s become fairly common knowledge that Facebook is now the most visited site on the Internet. What is less commonly known, however, is just how much of the total web traffic Facebook receives. We’ll put it this way: If you were to take all the page views on the Internet and bake them into a pie, about one-fourth of that pie would be hits received by Facebook.

It’s important to note here that we’re not talking about the total number of visitors that the page receives. While a high portion of Facebook’s 500,000,000 population logs in frequently (in fact, nearly 200 million get to the site at least once per month, and about half of U.S. users visit daily), Facebook’s total visitor count is right on par with Google’s. What’s different is how many pages are explored within the site.

Every time someone visits a new page on Facebook, it counts as a different “page view” or “hit.” With so many different pages frequently being explored on Facebook, this inflates the site’s numbers fairly dramatically. An average user visits about four pages each time he or she logs on. This includes all applications, quizzes, games, and profile pages on the massive social networking site.

The site has continued at a fantastic rate of growth, with different analysts showing numbers anywhere from about fifty percent to 100% growth in the 2009 to 2010 year. Reasons for the vast difference in figures comes in part from whether one is looking at global or U.S. statistics, and whether or not hits from mobile phones and phone applications are being counted toward the total. While the company’s total pace is starting to slow, they’re still growing more quickly than other social networking forerunners, such as second-place finisher Twitter, which sports about a thirty percent growth over the same time period.