World's biggest websites
The world’s most popular website in May this year was, unsurprisingly, Google. The search engine giant attracted just short of 122 million unique visitors during the month, a good 8 million more than rival Yahoo! at just over 114 million.
Yahoo!, however, proved to be a whole lot more "sticky" than Google with its users spending an average of 3 hours and 13 minutes on the site during the month. Google’s users spent and average of 1 hour and 15 minutes on the site.
The list of the world’s top ten sites according to web traffic analysts, Nielsen Online, also lists Microsoft, AOL and Apple among the top performers.
Microsoft’s primary site attracted upwards of 97 million visitors during May while its MSN/Windows Live site also claimed 97 million unique visitors in the month. Aggregating the unique readers to Microsoft’s sites makes the company the second-largest publisher with 123 million readers in May, just 4 million shy of Google’s 127 million readers across its sites.
AOL took fourth spot in the most popular website category, followed by Fox Interactive, YouTube, Wikipedia, eBay and Apple. The primary Apple site attracted 50,5 million unique visitors during the month.
In the publisher stakes, a measure of all sites from each stable, big media houses made a strong showing, including the likes of News Corp, Time Warner, and the New York Times Company. Time Warner pulled in 107 million unique readers to its sites, while News Corp, Rupert Murdock’s media giant which owns MySpace, attracted 79 million unique browsers.
Once the darling of the Internet, Amazon’s sites attracted 55 million visitors, just enough to keep it in ninth spot, ahead of the New York Times Company with 51 million visitors.
In comparison, South Africa’s largest site is News24.com which attracts up to 1.9 million unique readers a month.
Nielsen Online is a global web traffic analysis company monitoring visitors to many of the world’s largest websites.
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