Jun 22, 2011 09:11 GMT  ·  By
Google has become the first internet company with one billion unique visitors
   Google has become the first internet company with one billion unique visitors

Google has become the first company to get one billion unique visitors in one month. In May, Google sites amassed over one billion visitors based on comScore estimates. Google continues to be the largest internet company, when it comes to unique visitors, enjoying a solid lead even though competitors are close.

According to the report, Google saw an 8.4 percent rise during the past year to reach the milestone. Meanwhile, Microsoft is staying close with 905 million unique visitors in May, a 15 percent year-over-year growth.

Facebook is coming fast from behind though, it hit 714 million visitors in the last month worldwide, 30 percent more than in May 2010.

If Facebook continues to grow at this rate, it has a strong position to become the largest website globally.

Third-party estimates also show that Facebook now has close to or over 700 million users, though these numbers are based on ad reach estimates made available by Facebook.

Facebook has criticized the reports indicating that it's losing users in the US, where it dropped by 6 million visitors in the past month, though the comScore estimate comes very close to the other reports, despite the different methods of coming up with the numbers.

Whatever the case, Facebook has overtaken Yahoo as the number three internet company in terms of unique visitors.

Yahoo got 689 million unique visitors in the last month, a close to 11 percent yearly growth, but not enough to enable it to maintain its position.

However, the number of unique visitors is not the only important metric, in terms of how much time users spend on the site, Facebook is the clear winner, users spent 250 billion minutes in May on the site, a 66.6 percent increase from the previous year.

Users spent 204 billion minutes on Microsoft sites in May, a 13.6 percent decrease, and 200 billion minutes on Google sites, a 13 percent rise. [via Digits]