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8/22/2013 @ 4:46AM |6,805 views
Yahoo Is The Number One US Website Again, Beating Google
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This is an interesting little number showing that something is going right at Yahoo YHOO +2.77%. The latest Comscore numbers show that it’s the leading destination for US based internet users once again.
OK, that’s interesting in itself, that the various things Yahoo has been doing recently have propelled it up above Google GOOG +0.28% again. And yes, you can indeed see Tumblr recorded separately there, this is not that Yahoo have bought that traffic, this is either other purchases or organic growth.
However, the numbers that really interested me here are the historical ones from 2008 shown here, at Marketing Land. There’s some changes you would expect in popularity: Facebook FB +0.56%comes from nowhere in 2008 (well, D’Oh!) to being fourth now. Others show no change, Apple AAPL -0.67% still sits at 11 just as it did in 2008.
But the thing that really caught my eye was the total number of unique users. This has risen from 188 million a month to 225 million a month. That’s actually very slow growth over a 5 year period, slow by the standards of online that is. Yet this should also be obvious (so obvious that I didn’t realise it until I saw the numbers right in front of me) for we’re getting close to the total adult population of the US here being recorded as users of the internet. And it’s that part that I find so interesting.
In order to increase traffic numbers companies cannot rely (or cannot rely very much that is) on ever more US based people flooding onto the net. We’re already pretty much there with everyone on it. It will never be 100% of course and there are only 300 million people in the country. Some of whom, the babies and so on, just aren’t quite ready for the experience yet.
This leaves people looking for more traffic with a number of options, this is true. More non-US based people (there’s still billions not able to access for the simple reason of not having the equipment to access the internet), attracting users from other sites and, of course, increasing the amount of time someone spends upon any one site. So growth in traffic is most certainly still possible. Yet those landrush days seem to be passing at least as far as the US is concerned. There is no great mass of population still to attract to the internet, there’s only competition against other sites for peoples’ attention left.
Quite how this will change things I’m not sure. But it looks to me a little like the US itself in the 1890s. There’s no more wilderness to be settled out there, you cannot just move west and find virgin land again. It’s at that point that the country intensified its exploitation of the land and resources instead of just expanding over them. Something similar seems likely to happen online given the similarities in the situations.
