Microsoft Dominates Domain Ratings, Google Tops Brand Ratings

Email Arnold Zafra Follow me on Twitter

09/11/07

Nielsen/Netratings released its Topline U.S. Data for August 2007 covering Top Sites by Parent Company and Top Brands. Before going into the findings of the ratings, it should be noted that this the first ratings released by Nielsen/Netratings employing its new measurement gauge of measuring the time spent by individual users on a particular site.

So, the data that was released now includes the time spent on the site person in addition to the total unique audience that site gathered for the month.

Now, looking at the data for the top 10 parent companies, Microsoft beats rival Google both in terms of total unique audience (119,058) and Time per person (2:11:23). Google registered 116,939 total unique audience with an average of 1:40 time spent by its visitors. Following Google is expectedly Yahoo with 110,651 unique visitors but surprisingly users spent more time in Yahoo domain than in the other top two companies.

This data could be interpreted as Yahoo having less visitors but those visitors spend more time in the Yahoo domain, partaking of Yahoo’s web applications and services. While Google may have more visitors than Yahoo, but these visitors doesn’t really spend that much time (in fact the average time spent is too short).

Surprisingly, Microsoft’s domain seem to be enjoying a lot of visits and at the same time, these visitors spending a good amount of time in their domain. Is Microsoft a better company for web users?

Well, the data for the top 10 brands seems to prove otherwise. Google tops the list despite having the least amount of time spent by its user. Yahoo ranks in second with a lesser unique audience but with the longest time spent by readers. Microsoft lags far behind in both unique audience and time spent per person.

Surprisingly, considering the three top ranking companies in both the list, Yahoo seems to be enjoying the most amount of time spent by its reader in both its domain and other branded contents. Is this an indication of Yahoo getting more valued users or is it just a result of more users using Yahoo’s web mail account, or perhaps its photo sharing site, Flickr?

Jose

I doubt it will take Google much time to pass Microsoft. Maybe by next year :)

Jen

It's not surprising that MS beats G for time spent online seeing as how so many people still use hotmail. However, if you actually measure the time when people were doing anything active (rather than reading an email) I'm sure Google would be way out on top.

JS

I think Gmail will eventually be the biggest.

mark

Arnold - I'm not entirely sure, but I believe Hotmail is still the biggest.

There is also the default MSN homepage in an IE browser to consider with every M$ OS that is installed -- which some people don't know how to change (and is good enough for them).

Arnold Zafra

Thanks Sarki.

Mark - The question is who has a larger user base, Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo Mail?

Jon - You are right. Or we could also take into account the web activities in each company in August. But ultimately, statistics wise, the number of page views is of higher value than time spent.

Jon Kelly

Arnold, I think it's just the nature of what each is offering and what constitutes "success." For Google, they've been successful if you quickly find what you need and then click it. For Yahoo & MSN, they are successful if you spend an hour reading your mail, news or playing fantasty sports on their sites and see hundreds of ad impressions.