Google, not Facebook, first to one billion visitors

Statistics from comScore Data Mine show Google as leading all Web properties worldwide

Well, that’s weird.

Many of us social media folk have been waiting in breathless anticipation for the day (oh, the day!) that Facebook, king of all things social, announces that it has surpassed one billion users. While that day might be a year or two off, if it ever comes, a milestone popped up today that not many expected to see.

In May, Google, across its many Web properties, became the first to surpass one billion unique visitors globally, according to comScore. To attain that honor, Google Sites grew a steady eight percent from May 2010, and finally hit the tipping point last month.

Not too far behind Google is Microsoft Sites, which reached 905 million visitors in May. Neck and neck in third and fourth place are Facebook and Yahoo Sites, with the former reaching 713.6 million visitors. Down below around the 400 million mark is Wikimedia Sites.

Remarkably, all the sites ranked, except for maybe Wikimedia, experienced some sort of growth in the past year. Entrenched in the social media landscape, I want to attribute this strange trend to Facebook’s effect on the Web. Remember that the company launched social media plugins like the Like button and recommend buttons just over a year ago, and those plugins spent the last year widely proliferating.

In that vein, the past year or two has given rise to an undeniable boom in the tech industry, in general, so that may be to blame as well.

All that said, I’ll still be standing by to hear when Facebook (or some other unexpected entrant?) announces that they have one billion members. There’s a big difference between just a “visitor” and a registered user who actively uses the site through their registered account. And Facebook supposedly already has 700 million of the latter.

Factoring into Google’s one billion could be as simple a visitor as somebody searching for one thing and then moving onto another site. On Facebook, there’s usually a higher level of engagement on the main site, which is why the younger company is so greatly disrupting advertising, marketing and e-commerce.