Facebook Leads in Google’s Top 1,000 Websites

Google has introduced a couple of new features for its advertising solutions, in particular the DoubleClick Ad Planner. For anyone outside of the online marketing business, that may not sound particularly interesting. What is interesting, though, is the new Ad Planner 1000 list, which features the top 1,000 websites in the world ranked by unique visitors. It makes for a very nice read for anyone even remotely interested in the web.

Google uses various sources to come up with the numbers, but the ranking, at least at the very top, shouldn’t surprise anyone. By Google’s own account, Facebook is the world’s largest website. It gets about 540 million unique visitors each month and 570 billion, yes billion, page views. While it may have some competition when it comes to visitors, in terms of page views nothing comes even remotely close.

Yahoo, the number-two website in the list, gets only 70 billion page views from 490 million visitors. From then on, the closest competitors have slightly more than half as many page views, for example Live.com gets about 39 billion from 370 million visitors.

There aren’t any big surprises in the top ten, Wikipedia comes in at number four, Baidu gets a respectable eighth place and Mozilla manages to squeeze in at number ten with 140 million unique visitors. Wikipedia and Mozilla are the only two websites in the top ten that feature no advertising.

At this point, you’re probably wondering, what about Google? Google.com is likely still the most visited web page on Earth. And YouTube would definitely make it into the top ten. Unfortunately, the top doesn’t include certain Google sites, Blogspot.com makes it at number seven, though. It also doesn’t include ad networks, adult sites and websites that don’t have public content.

Google doesn’t bill the top as accurate metric data, most of the numbers are rounded out, but it’s good enough to serve the company’s purpose. Because, this is the interesting part, advertisers can now choose to target just these top 1,000 websites in their campaigns and nothing else.