Yahoo! still the most visited sites

Back in November, ComScore's report showed that Yahoo! was dethroned by MySpace as the most viewed site based on page views. Many people argued at the time that it is simply because Yahoo! had ajax'ed many of its properties, including it's flagship product, Yahoo! mail. But it is still interesting to find out how close exactly other sites have catch up to Yahoo. With the emerging of Ajax applications, page view is clearly no longer the correct metric to compare the popularities and usages among sites. A user actively engaged in an ajax site would record a handful of page views versus possibly hundreds of page views for a traditional site.

ComScore recently released its Media Metrix report for February 2007. It uses “visits” instead of "page views" for the metrix. The “visits” metric, by their definition, is the number of times a unique person accesses content within a Web entity with breaks between access of at least 30 minutes. This is certain a better metric. For the engaged user scenario above, both will be registered as one visit. But clearly, it is not perfect. A user spending hours on one site chatting with friends is considered one visit while a user occationally checks email once every hour is recorded as multiple visits.

Nonetheless, this gives us a better picture of the landscape. From the report, Yahoo! once again comes up on top, in both unique visitors as well as average visits per visitor. Based on unique visitor report, it seems like sites such as Microsoft and Google are up to Yahoo's neck. For example, Yahoo haa 128M unique visitors while Google has 114M. That represents only a little more than 10% advantage for Yahoo. But the "visits" report tells a different story. Yahoo has 28.6 visits per unique visitor while Google has only 17.7. That means their users visit Yahoo more than half the time they visit Google.

The combination of these reports shows an even bigger gap. Multiplying unique visitors by visits per unique visitors gives you the total visits for the month. Therefore, Yahoo has 128M*28.6 or 3661M total visits versus 114M*17.7 or 2018M total visits. Yahoo has almost double of Google's visits! Now, lets look at how MySpace fares with Yahoo. Fox Interactive Media, which owns MySpace, has 78M unique visitors and 16.9 visits per visitor. That gets 1318M visits. Yahoo has nearly triple their visits!

So for now, Yahoo is still the King.