Google sites raked in more than a billion unique visitors in the month of May, the first time an Internet company has reached that milestone, according to comScore data first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Traffic to Google properties has increased by 8.4 percent over the past year to reach the billion hit mark. Microsoft has maintained the second-place spot with 905 million unique visitors last month, a 15 percent increase. Facebook takes the No. 3 spot with about 714 million visitors, up 30 percent. Yahoo comes in at number four with 689 million unique visitors in May. While traffic to Yahoo increased by 10.8 percent, the company was leapfrogged by Facebook in October. Wikimedia sites rounded out the top five, with about 411 million visitors last month.
The WSJ notes that comScore started monitoring traffic to Google back in 2006, when it reported that Google had about 496 million unique visits per month. Back then, Microsoft and its MSN properties were the most-visited sites with roughly 536 million unique visitors each month. But in the years following, the game has changed; Google has vastly expanded its brand, launching Gmail, acquiring YouTube, and introducing a mobile platform with Android.
Perhaps more notable than the number of unique visitors is the amount of time spent on a website. Facebook is tops in this area. Last month, comScore says people spent 250 billion minutes on Facebook, two-thirds more time than they were spending on the social-networking site a year ago, and much more time than they're spending on any other property. By contrast, users spent 204 billion minutes on Microsoft sites in May, a 13.6 percent decrease, and they spent 200 billion minutes on Google sites, up 13 percent.
Google would not comment on comScore's stats.
No comments:
Post a Comment