ComScore: Google and Facebook Big Winners in 2007

According to comScore, the Internet's biggest winners in 2007 included Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and Craigslist.

The Reston, Virginia.-based company released a report Wednesday highlighting the major trends in U.S. Internet activity in 2007, including top gaining properties and site categories, and core search market growth.

Social networking giant Facebook.com saw huge growth after opening registration to all users (previously the site was only open to high school and college students.) Traffic to the site jumped 81% versus December 2006 to 34.7 million visitors in December 2007.

Wikipedia Sites gained 34% to reach nearly 52 million visitors. Leading classified site Craigslist.org jumped 74% to 24.5 million visitors, while AT&T grew 27% to 30.2 million visitors boosted by its exclusive deal with Apple as carrier for the iPhone. Yellow Book Network jumped 137% to 10.4 million visitors.

Several of the top-gaining properties were driven by the acquisition of Web entities including Everyday Health, which gained 349% driven by its acquisition of Drugs.com and other sites. Glam Media, grew 213% due in part to the addition of several new entities, including Quality Health Network, MyYearbook.com, and LifeScript.com. Yellow Book Network grew 137% to 10.4 million visitors, as visitation to Yellowbook.com Sites tripled (up 207% to 4.6 million visitors) and one new entity was added to the property.

iVillage.com: The Women's Network gained 27% with the addition of Sugar Publishing, MakeoverSolutions.com, and iWin.com, among others. Demand Media added numerous entities under its Demand Media Knowledge and Demand Media Games media titles, which contributed to its 149% growth. OfficeMax's dramatic 199% gain was driven primarily by a December 2007 surge in visitation to its popular viral holiday greetings site ElfYouself.com.

The top-gaining site categories in 2007 reflected trends in both the online and offline worlds, according to comScore analysts. The politics category grabbed the top position, gaining 35%, as the 2008 presidential election and primary season kicked into high gear.

Women's community sites also jumped 35%, as the top two properties in the category, Glam Media and iVillage.com, saw strong growth. With the ever-increasing coverage of celebrity news, from Britney Spears' meltdowns to Anna Nicole Smith's death, entertainment news sites jumped 32%. Online classifieds had a strong 2007 growing 31% versus year ago, as it continued to impinge on traditional news media's classified revenues.

In 2007, searches at the five major core search engines increased 15% to 9.6 billion searches. Google Sites led with 5.6 billion searches in December 2007, up more than 30% from the previous year. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 2.2 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (940 million), Time Warner Network (442 million), and Ask Network (415 million). More than 113 billion core searches were conducted in the U.S. during all of 2007, with Google Sites accounting for nearly 64 billion, representing a 56% share of the market.

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