Yahoo overtakes Google as most viewed website – now it just needs to make money from it
Yahoo has overtaken Google as the site with the most traffic in the US, according to statistics from comScore.
Unique visitors to Yahoo rose to 196.6m in July – up 21 per cent from the year before. Unique visitors to Google sites (including YouTube) increased by less than one per cent to 192.3m.
Microsoft sites came in third with 179.6m unique visitors, Facebook in fourth with 142.3m and AOL fifth with 174m.
Source: comScore
The figures measured reflect only the number of visitors to each company’s websites rather than how many use their search engines. Google is by far the market leader in this respect, holding 67 per cent of the market in June according to comScore, followed by Microsoft Bing with 17 per cent and Yahoo with 12 per cent.
The figures don't include Yahoo's Tumblr service – which attracted 38.m unique viewers last month – but also don't include mobile views, in which Yahoo is widely considered to lag behind the competition.
The latest figures will nonetheless give a boost to chief executive Marissa Mayer, who said during the company's second quarter conference call that traffic was increasing – unprecedented for an established company in decline.
Yet despite the increased traffic, Yahoo is struggling to pull in the advertisers. Revenues from display advertising – the company's primary source of revenue – fell by 11 per cent to $423m in the second quarter, leading the company to slash its full year earnings and sales forecast. Revenue for search advertising, by comparison, rose by five per cent.