The latest top 50 U.S. web brands December report from comScore for the last month of 2011 has been released yesterday, continuing the great momentum trend online retailers have due to the second month of the holiday season, after they already had vast gains in November.
Overall, except for few prominent categories risings (regular holiday season trends) and a few specific “rising stars” sites we can’t really say something unusual and significant happened. In general, the total number of unique visitors remained almost exactly the same with 220.4 million (0.25% decrease from the prior month).
Here is the full list of the top 50 U.S. web brands for December 2011:
The Top 10 Remained Almost The Same
Except for Glam Media that advanced to the eighth place from the tenth (had 3.2% visitors increase), all the top 10 kept their prior month status. However, while the top three brands had a small visitors increase (Google +0.3%, Microsoft +1%, Yahoo +1.1%) Facebook had slightest steep decline of 2.1%.
Besides Turner Digital that had a 3.6% visitors loss, the rest of the top 10 web brands had an insignificant visitors change.
Rising Categories- Taxes, Shipping and Retail
Where many people and organization have calculated their yearly taxes, taxes sites benefited from a 28.7% jump in visits although no specific site can be pointed out. Shipping sites also gained a large increase of 21.8% (mostly driven by “Green Monday”) where we can indicate on sites like USPS (+33.2%), UPS (+31.4%) and FedEx (+22%).
Retail categories such as movies (+21.1%), accessories (+19%) and gifts (+18.7%) demonstrated large growth as a result of increased shopping trend by consumers.
Monthly “Rising Stars”- JibJab, Pinterest and AVG
JibJab, that provides holiday eCards, produced the biggest jump in visitors (+206.7%) among all websites. The second most growing site is Pinterest with 54.8% increase in visits (as already reported before). In the third rapidly-growing place we can find the anti-virus provider, AVG, with a visitors increase of 38.2%, probably due to heavy hacking month.
Other notable “jumpers” are Netflix (+30.6%), Instagram (+30.3%), CollegeHumor (+26%) and Zazzle (+2.6%).
