Nielsen: Google is the best online brand in the US in 2011, according to the US website traffic rankings

Figure 1: Top 10 Internet Brands in the United States

On December 29, 2011, market research firm Nielsen released its 2011 web traffic ranking data on Wednesday, with Google narrowly beating Facebook to become the best US web brand of the year.

According to Nielsen data, as shown in Figure 1, Google has an average of 153.4 million unique visitors per month, followed by Facebook at 137.6 million. Yahoo ranks third with an average of 130.1 million unique visitors per month. Microsoft's MSN, Windows Live and Bing together rank fourth, while Microsoft itself ranks sixth. Video site YouTube ranks fifth in the survey, with an average of 106.6 million visitors per month.

Figure 2: Top 10 SNS and blog sites in the United States

As shown in Figure 2, Facebook unsurprisingly topped the annual social network and blog site rankings, while Blogger ranked second with 45.7 million unique visitors. Twitter ranked third with 23.5 million unique visitors.

Google+, a social service launched by Google just six months ago, ranks eighth in this ranking, with 8.2 million unique visitors per month. When the service was first launched in June, many people doubted whether this new social platform could threaten Facebook's position in the field. In terms of the number of registered users, Google+ has 62 million users, while Facebook has 800 million users. It seems that this threat will not happen in the short term.

Interestingly, MySpace beat Google+ and was sold to News Corp. in June for a discounted price of $35 million. LinkedIn ranked sixth and Tumblr ranked seventh, ranking fifth with 17.9 million monthly unique visitors.

Figure 3: Top 10 video websites in the United States

As shown in Figure 3, in the ranking of video websites, YouTube topped the list with 11.1 million monthly average unique users, while Vevo, which ranked second, had only 34.5 million monthly average unique users. Facebook ranked third with 29.3 million unique visitors. Hulu ranked seventh with 13.1 million unique visitors. Netflix, which ranked tenth, had 7.4 million unique visitors.

Nielsen also released a ranking of smartphone manufacturers. As shown in Figure 4, Apple's share is 29%, ranking first with nearly one-third of the market share. HTC is closely behind, with a 21% share. BlackBerry manufacturer RIM ranks third with a 17% share. Then there are Samsung and Motorola Mobility, with 11%.

Figure 4: Top five smart device manufacturers in the United States