Comscore August Internet usage holds a few surprises

A few days ago I got my hands on a UBS research paper analyzing comScore August U.S. Audience Data via John Battelle's Searchblog and was quite surprised to see a few things.

The first chart I'll bring lists the top 10 sites in terms of page views and unique visitors. Data for Fox is skewed because of the inclusion of MySpace.

You can see how Yahoo!, Time Warner (AOL), MSN, Google and eBay keep their respective places. In terms of growth it is interesting to see Google's Y/Y sharp growth in page views compared to the declining growth of the portals. In the unique visitor category, most sites posted positive M/M growth. eBay and Google's decline M/M in page views is also worth noting.

Now this is where it really becomes interesting:

You can see how the social sites dominate the above two lists and that the Internet portals hold their ground, but Google is nowhere to be found. The UBS report also shows the growth rates for these charts as well as a third list of Average Days Per Month Per Visitor where Google is in fifth place after Yahoo!, AOL and MSN.

The report also has nifty graphs comparing Google and Yahoo!, illustrating very well the impact of Google on Yahoo's growth and showing how Google's growth has somewhat leveled off in the past few months.