Nielsen has released a list of the top web brands visited by U.S. net users in the month of August 2011.
An August post on the Nielsen Blog explains that such lists are compiled by examining data collected from two sources: Nielsen's "online panel," which is "a people-based representative sample employed to measure consumer's Internet behavior using Home and Work computers"; and "tag-based data from websites to account for Internet use from any source."
Unsurprisingly, Facebook appears near the top of Nielsen's August list, according to Nielsen's Blog post about the new list. Although the social network does not nab the number-one spot for the most unique visitors, these users logged far and away the most time interacting with Facebook-branded pages. During the month of August, the average Facebook user spent a total of 7 hours and 45 minutes on the site. Visitors to the Aol Media Network (parent company of The Huffington Post) spent the next-longest amount of time, logging an average of 2 hours and 52 minutes, nearly 5 fewer hours than users spent on Facebook.
Facebook's stunning stats fall in line with Nielsen's September Social Media Report, which found that Facebook users in the United States spent a total of 53.5 billion minutes per month on the site, making it the most popular destination for American web users.
Several similarities can be found between Nielsen's list of the top U.S. brands and Alexia's list of the web's most popular sites, which tallies three months worth of a site's visitors and page views. Websites for nearly all the brands in Nielsen's top 10 list appear in Alexia's top 20 most popular sites. (Take a look at Alexia's top sites, as reported in August 2011.)
Have a look through Nielsen's August list of the top 10 most popular online brands in the U.S. (below). Are you surprised that any of your favorites didn't make the list?
