Who's the Web Daddy? Microsoft beats up on Google

Davey Winder
Monday, 09 November 2009 17:35

Your IT - Home IT

When you think of web giants in terms of market share of eyes on sites, the chances are you think of Google ruling the roost. Well you would be wrong, Microsoft pwns the Web!

According to new figures published by comScore , a company which specialises in measuring the digital landscape, when it comes to 'online engagement' Microsoft really does rule the roost and beats off competition from Google, Yahoo! and Facebook.

The data covers the month of September 2009 and reveals that some 27 billion hours were spent online worldwide. Those figures are based upon a global Internet population of some 1.2 billion users aged 15 and over.

The survey itself was full of surprises. How about the fact that Facebook has seen growth, in terms of time spent visiting the site, of some 193% year on year? During September alone, users spent 1.4 billion hours on Facebook making it the fourth most engaging property online.

Less surprising was the appearance of Google and Yahoo! sites in the top three. Yahoo! online properties scraped into third place just ahead of Facebook with a combined online viewing time of 1.7 billion hours.

Google made it to the number two spot with 9.3% of the total minutes spent online in September, some 2.5 billion hours in all. YouTube accounted for 1.2 billion of those hours, making far and away the most popular Google-owned site.

But there was no beating Microsoft which wiped the floor with the competition by some margin. According to comScore, Microsoft online sites accounted for 14.5% of all the minutes spent online globally during September.

To put that into some kind of perspective, Microsoft properties grabbed 3.9 billion hours worth of Internet user attention in one month. That is more than Google and Yahoo! sites added together.

So what is the magic Microsoft ingredient that enabled it to steal so much time from the other big players? No, it was nothing to do with the Windows 7 launch. or even the infamous Hotmail hack.

Instead the simple truth was that Windows Live Messenger accounted for nearly 70% of that total Microsoft site viewing time. People love to chat, and most of them are apparently still chatting using Microsoft tools.