• by July 13, 2007

A month before the release of iPhone, Apple saw a 5% increase in worldwide Web visitors, according to comScore World Metrix, which released May rankings yesterday.

Apple, which jumped to 120 million unique visitors in May, entered comScore's worldwide Top Properties list at number 10. But those users only visited Apple an average of 1.4 times apiece, compared with more than 20 average visits for the top three properties--Google (27), Microsoft (23), and Yahoo (22)--which reached 536 million, 528 million and 469 million unique visitors apiece. The remainder of the top 10 in order consisted of Time Warner Networks, eBay, Wikipedia, Fox Interactive Media, Amazon and CNET, with both eBay and Amazon up over 4% from April.

Propelled by what comScore termed an upsurge in online shopping caused by Mother's Day and the start of the summer holiday season, price-comparison group Ciao Sites was the fastest-growing of all worldwide properties in May--up 31% to 29.6 million unique visitors. Facebook continued its rapid global growth, rising 21.8% to become the second-fastest-growing site, with 47.2 million unique visitors--who visited an average of 20.6 times each, more than five times as much as any of the other top 10 fastest-growing properties.

In addition to Ciao and Facebook, the rest of the top 10 fastest-growing properties were Mozilla, Priceline, European retailer Karstadt-Quelle, Photobucket, Deutsche Telekom, Metacafe, Dailymotion and Verizon.

comScore reported 722 million total global online users (15+) in May--up from 766 million in April, and representing 16% of the total 15+ worldwide population. Google reached almost 70% of all global Internet users.