Mountain View, California — If you ever had a notion that social media giant Facebook was one of the only most popular sites in the world, then hold your breathe! Old timer search engine giant Google has beaten the game. According to the Wall Street Journal, stated that Google has achieved an unprecedented milestone as the world’s first Internet company to claim over one (1) billion unique visitors in a single month on its websites, based on figures quoted by comScore data for May.
According to statistics published by comScore early this week for the month of May, Google-owned websites, including its search engine, email service Gmail, and video-sharing site YouTube, among others, recorded more than a billion unique visitors, an 8.4 percent increase over the previous year. Besides, this data includes calculated estimates based on past data and trends about the number of hits that top websites get.
Across the world, Media Metrix firm comScore said top web properties in the US looks a little different, with Yahoo leading the charge, followed by Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and AOL.
Moreover, million more users than the next most popular company on the web, comScore reports. Google’s unique visitors per month have increased 8.4% to over one billion, this means that Google has about one seventh of the world’s population using its website.
While Microsoft sites retained 905 million unique visitors, were the second most-visited destination on the Internet and Facebook came in third with 714 million users, up 30 percent from over the previous year, and lastly Yahoo! even though posting a significant growth is in fourth place with 690 million visitors.
Here is the top 50 for the US:
Image Credit: (comScore)
Traffic to Google properties has more than doubled in the past five years, from 496 million unique users in 2006, when comScore began measuring sites’ unique visitors, to over 1 billion today.
However, comScore’s analysis are structured on its “global measurement panel” of two million Internet users, similar to how Nielsen measures television ratings. comScore further refines its analysis with “page view” data that it receives from more than 90 of the 100 publishers of Web content, but not from Google.
Google witnessed its greatest numbers in India and South Africa, which accounted for 14.3 percent and 13.5 percent of its visitors, respectively. The lowest numbers were in South Korea and China, which accounted for 0.7 percent and 0.8 percent of total worldwide visitors, respectively.
Another research by Hitwise, a firm providing online competitive intelligence, released in December 2010 discovered that while Facebook had surpassed Google.com as the most-visited website of the year among U.S. users, when the share of all Google-owned properties was taken together, Google could still claim a greater share of visits (9.85 percent to Facebook’s 8.93 percent).
Although Google grabbed the most visitors last month, users collectively spent almost 250 billion minutes in May on Facebook, as compared with 200 billion minutes at Google and 204 billion at Microsoft, virtually two-thirds more time than they were spending on the social media networking site a year ago, and much more time than they are spending on any other property.