Web metrics company comScore on Monday announced its Media Metrix Top 50 U.S. Web properties for the month of December, an important time to watch web traffic due to the holiday-related shopping that takes place. Once again, comScore ranked Yahoo and its related sites as the top Web property with 182 million unique viewers, beating out Google's 179.3 million and Microsoft's 177 million.
Amazon saw a spike in traffic in December that drove it up to the #7 position, and weather-related sites The Weather Channel and WeatherBug both enjoyed big spikes in unique visits due to holiday-related travel planning.
Of course, it is Yahoo's position at the top of the rankings that is worthy of thinking about for a moment. I contacted comScore to find some insight into what helped put Yahoo at the top of its ranks --whether it was Yahoo's merchant solutions or shopping comparison sites-- but the company's representatives didn't provide any further information into which Yahoo sites drew the traffic.
The reason I asked comScore about this was because in July it admitted that it had been vastly underrepresenting Yahoo in its Web traffic tallies. The error amounted to a discrepancy of more than one billion pageviews in the month of June 2010, which ended up placing Yahoo's sites behind Facebook in popularity.
But then in August, Yahoo was ranked as the number one most visited Web property in comScore's top 50. Every month prior to this in 2010, and indeed nearly every month between 2008 and 2010 in comScore's ranks, Yahoo was in the #2 position between Google's and Microsoft's sites.
Suddenly, after comScore came forward that it had mis-counted Yahoo's traffic, Yahoo's numbers were higher, and much more competitive with Google than they had been for a long time.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010