During the month of May, Google logged a record one billion visitors from around the world – the first time an Internet company has achieved such a remarkable feat.
comScore, which published the findings, says the Internet search giant continues to grow in terms of unique visitors, improving by better than 8% over last year’s 931 million monthly visitors.
Although there was some competitive speculation that Microsoft or possibly even Facebook would be the first to reach the one billion milestone, the “race” ultimately wasn’t even close.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft finished second in May with 905 million unique visitors while Facebook saw just 714 million visitors. Yahoo was close behind with 689 million visitors.
In 2006, comScore began measuring global unique-visitor traffic on websites. In those days, Google was drawing approximately 500 million unique visitors per month.
comScore, however, points out that Facebook still has the upper-hand on its rivals Microsoft and Google in at least one aspect. Earlier this year, the social network blew past both Google and Microsoft on the basis of how much time users spend on its site. And in terms of advertising revenue potential, this gives Facebook a substantial advantage over the competition.
During May, Internet users spent roughly 50 billion more minutes on Facebook than either Microsoft sites or Google.
