Yahoo! Dominates U.S. Website Traffic

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 21, 6:09AM EST

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) continued to hold a significant lead as the most visited website in the United States, based on January figures. The owners of the other two portals, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) lagged behind it, as did Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) search engine. Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) also fell well back of Yahoo! The numbers are such that they may help Yahoo! rise out of its advertising growth doldrums.

According to comScore data, based on U.S. desktop activity, the “Top 50” properties were dominated by portals, e-commerce and media sites. Yahoo!’s first place spot was due to its 195.2 million unique visitors. Next on the list was Google at 192.3 million. Third was Microsoft sites at 175.3 million. Microsoft owns portal MSN. Facebook was next at 140.8 million. AOL was fifth at 120.1 million. Next was e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) at 116.4 million. Sites owned by tradition media companies, including Time Warner Inc.’s (NYSE: TWX) Turner properties, CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) and Gannett Co. Inc. (NYSE: GCI), had unique visitors of more than 50 million in January.

Yahoo! has been criticized for its inability to increase revenue from display advertising. If there are two things that could help it break a cycle of flat sales, or even slowly declining ones, first would be the company’s diversity of content. It has, according to research, the Web’s largest financial, sports, news and gossip/entertainment destinations based on visitors. The other advantage Yahoo! has in the ad marketplace is its sheer size. If it can leverage this leadership, marketers may turn to it in greater numbers. At least that is the way the broader media industry works in terms of newspapers, magazines, radio and television. It could be that the Internet is not terribly different, or might not be in the near future.

So, with size as its ally, Yahoo! has a significant edge to take back some of the advertising market share it has lost primarily to Facebook and Google. That is, of course, if it can make its size matter.

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.