We're told that finally an Internet company has done it. Google has managed to get to one billion visitors in only one month.
Yes, this does mean that one seventh of humanity hit a Google web page in just that one calendar month.
As the WSJ tells us:
Google’s websites had more than a billion unique visitors in May, the first time an Internet company has hit that benchmark, according to comScore data released Tuesday.
Over the past year, Google’s unique visitors per month have increased 8.4% to just over one billion. During the same period, Microsoft maintained the No. 2 position with 905 million unique visitors in May, up around 15%, while Facebook’s count surged by 30% to about 714 million visitors. In May, Yahoo saw 689 million visitors, up 10.8% over the past year, though it was surpassed by Facebook in October.
There are various ways that you can measure web traffic and all of them are going to be guesses that are more or less informed. Google does not release numbers to comScore for example so the Google numbers are inevitably estimated from other information.
The usual ways are page views, visits and unique visitors.
A page view is just that, anyone at any time viewing a single page of data. If the same person goes to page two of the article then that's two page views.
A visit is usually one person per website per day. So if that same person read those two pages one after the other then that's two page views but only one visit. If they came back later in the day it's still only one visit but if they read page one on one day and page two on another then that's two page views.
Unique visitors numbers are reached by counting each individual only once in each month. So someone who read the entirety of this site every day would be racking up some very large number of page views but would only be one unique visitor for the whole month.
Given what it is that comScore is estimating there, that really is a rather impressive level of traffic going to Google pages, don't you think? I find it very difficult to think of any private sector company anywhere, ever, that has managed to have one seventh of the human race as a customer in just one month.
Anyone want to prove me wrong?
