Well, this is a surprise. According to comScore’s Web Rankings report for July 2013, Yahoo’s bouquet of sites served more unique visitors from the U.S. in that month than Google’s websites. The report pegs Yahoo visitors for the month at about 196.5 million helping it take the top spot on the list followed by Google with 192.2 million, Microsoft with 179.6 million, Facebook with 142.2 million and AOL with 117.3 million. According to the blog Marketing Land, the last time Yahoo topped the monthly unique visitors list was in May 2011 when it beat Google by about 8.8 million visitors to take the top spot. It’s worth pointing out here that the U.S. contributed about 11.4% of global Internet usage in 2012.
Those who may be attributing Yahoo’s surprising success to its recent acquisition of popular microblogging platform Tumblr, will be surprised to learn that comScore didn’t actually take into account Tumblr’s numbers when drawing up the report. This shows Yahoo’s achievement in ever better light and also suggests that CEO Marissa Mayer may just be able to pull the company back into relevance. Under Mayer, Yahoo has already embarked on a process of change including the Tumblr acquisition and the acquisition of other promising companies such as Qwiki and Rockmelt, and a major design revamp that includes a fresh looking news page and mobile weather app.
Take a look at comScore’s complete list of the 50 most visited sites in the U.S. in July 2013:
Sources: comScore via The Next Web, Marketing Land, Royal Pingdom