Mountain View, California — Seeking to keep the sugar-coating ripened, world’s biggest search engine Google, as part of offering more choices to companies using AdWords, has publicly released a list of top 1000 sites around the globe, in which world’s largest social networking site Facebook secured the top spot by unique users.
The websites have been graded based on several criteria including unique visitors, pageviews and reach. According to the Google AdPlanner stats, Facebook claimed more than 540 million unique visitors per month, reaching a sizable chunk of 35.2 percent of the Internet population to the Facebook, followed by Yahoo!, Live and Wikipedia.
Surprisingly enough, Wikipedia and Mozilla are the only two websites in Google’s top 10 lists that does not deliver ads. However, Wikipedia is ranked fourth and comparatively Mozilla is placed on the 10th spot. Another noteworthy entry is of micro blogging site Twitter, with 98 million unique visitors per month and which also does not serve ads, is ranked 18th in the AdPlanner rankings.
Google AdPlanner accumulated the data from “a variety of sources including anonymized, aggregated Google Toolbar data from users who have opted in to enhanced features, publisher opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.”
Google also has introduced a couple of new attributes for its advertising solutions, in particular the DoubleClick Ad Planner. Google AdWords partners can now define to control their ads on these 1000 sites only. What is interesting, though, all this can be carried out by going to your AdWords account, going to the “category filters” section and then choosing “non ad planner 1000” as the category. Doing this will only run your ads on these top 1000 sites and not on any other website unless specifically mentioned.
Together with the Destinations portals, Yahoo.com is ranked 2, MSN.com is 5th and Baidu is on 8th position. High rank of these portals is most likely due to the fact that many people bookmark these sites as their favorite home page. Among the search engine, excluding Google, Live.com is on 2, has over 370 million unique per month, 13th ranked Bing.com having 110 million and Ask.com (20) with 88 million in the AdPlanner list.
However, there is more than just the listings of top 1000 websites to Google AdPlanner, simply selecting any of the websites gives you an extensive report on the traffic including average visits per visitor, average time spent on the site and top keywords used to search for the site. The report also contains a list of top sub-domains as well as a list of audience interests.
Nevertheless, the most interesting part of the report is the ability to drill down and see traffic details for each website at a country level. Simply pick a country from the drop down list and Google will show a detailed report on traffic coming from that specific country. The report was last generated in April 2010 and is supposed to be refreshed every month to reflect updated data.
According to Search Engine Land, Google is not just presenting this ranking, but it is also offering advertisers the choice of purchasing ads exclusively on these top 1000 most visited sites.
Google employed various approach to come up with the numbers, but the ranking, at least at the very top, should not surprise anyone. By Google’s own account, Facebook is the world’s largest website. It gets about 540 million unique visitors each month and 570 billion, yes billion, page views. While it may have some competition when it comes to visitors, in terms of page views nothing comes even remotely close.
Amazingly enough, Google’s own properties, like YouTube, Gmail, News, or Search has been missing from the list, but ultimately it gives an interesting insight into which top Websites do not serve advertising.
The company provides this caveat: “Keep in mind that the list excludes adult sites, ad networks, domains that do not have publicly visible content or do not load properly, and certain Google sites.”
Check out the top 13 most visited sites in the Slideshow below:
See the full ranking here.