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?
