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January 2013: Top U.S. Entertainment Sites and Web Brands

2 minute read | March 2013

Given the annual hype surrounding the recent South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, we decided to take a closer look at the entertainment websites that consumers visit most. For music fans, iTunes is one of the top online destinations for tunes, as nearly 45 million consumers used the online service in January 2013. Film buffs coming out of indie film screenings at SXSW have are array of entertainment sites to pick from, including IMDB, Netflix, and Yahoo’s Omg! websites, which attracted 25 million visitors in January.

Top 10 Entertainment Web Brands by Unique Audience (U.S. Total)

Rank Brand Unique Audience Time Per Person (hh:mm:ss)
1 YouTube 124,073,000 1:57:28
2 iTunes 44,965,000 1:11:58
3 Comcast Digital Entertainment Websites 33,825,000 0:54:42
4 Yahoo! Sports Websites 32,581,000 0:25:02
5 IMDb 29,783,000 0:17:49
6 Netflix 28,076,000 0:46:31
7 ESPN Digital Network 27,366,000 1:02:05
8 Omg! Websites 25,298,000 0:08:55
9 VEVO 25,204,000 0:07:54
10 FOXSports.com on MSN 24,385,000 0:09:59
Read as: YouTube’s website had 124 million unique U.S. visitors in January 2013 who spent an average of 1 hour 57 minutes per person using the site during the month.
Source: Nielsen

SXSW has a reputation for being the event where many tech and social sites made their breakthroughs, so we took a look at some of the more recent breakout stars from past years at SXSW to see how they’re doing today. Foursquare made its debut at SXSW in 2009 and now draws nearly 10 million monthly users to its smartphone app and attracts another 3 million on the Web. Twitter, the granddaddy of all SXSW breakthroughs, draws more than 35 million visitors to its website each month and another 27 million users of its mobile app. Traffic like this makes Twitter one of the top 25 Web brands and mobile apps in the U.S. Despite the seemingly limitless nature of the Web, Americans visited an average of just 96 unique domains per person in January, and about a dozen brands represent the most popular online destinations. In January 2013, Google was the top Web brand in the U.S. with over 170 million unique visitors. Among the top 10 Web brands, Web visitors spent the most time on Facebook–more than 6.5 hours on average.

Top 10 Web Brands by Unique Audience (U.S. Total)

Rank Brand Unique Audience Time Per Person (hh:mm:ss)
1 Google 170,629,000 2:05:30
2 Facebook 145,297,000 6:41:44
3 Yahoo! 135,100,000 2:32:52
4 YouTube 124,073,000 1:57:28
5 MSN/WindowsLive/Bing 123,133,000 1:15:40
6 Microsoft 86,986,000 0:47:26
7 Amazon 84,735,000 0:38:14
8 AOL Media Network 83,826,000 2:09:36
9 Wikipedia 76,310,000 0:24:25
10 Ask Network 69,447,000 0:12:30
Read as: Google had 170 million unique U.S. visitors in January who spent 2 hours 5 minutes per person on average during January 2013.
Source: Nielsen

Average U.S. Internet Usage for January 2013

Metrics Total
Sessions/Visits per Person 62
Domains Visited per Person 96
Web Page Views per Person 2417
Duration of a Web Page viewed 0:01:12
Online Time per Person 29:10:34
No. of People Who Went Online 208,703,000
No. of People who had Internet access 276,778,307
Read as: More than 209 million Americans were active online during January 2013.
Source: Nielsen

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