US web statistics released for May 2012: which sites dominate, and where do we go for online news?

Media research company Nielsen has released its monthly statistical summary of US website activity for May. Almost 212 million Americans went online over the course of the month, with the average web user spending over 29 hours online in total.

Google came out top across all websites in terms of total unique visitors, with its 173 million beating second placed Facebook by over 20 million. Yahoo completed the top three, while Wikipedia came in 8th place with 76.3 million.

The top ten, shown below, also included the likes of Youtube (127.5 million) and Amazon.com (76.1 million).

Nielsen also provided figures on the average length of time each unique visitor spent browsing each of the top ten most visited sites. Facebook dominated the field, with people spending almost six hours per month on the site. This total was three times longer than that of its closest rival among the ten shown, AOL.

It should be noted, however; that visitors may have spent more time browsing other sites than those shown here, since these are only the ten most frequently visited.

Each month Nielsen also focus on websites from a specific sector, and this time they analysed online news providers. The Yahoo!-ABC News Websites group had the most unique visitors - over 62 million - during May, with the CNN Digital Network (39.6 million) some way behind in second.

HPMG News Websites (formerly AOL News) rounded off the top three, with MSNBC and the New York Times in fourth and fifth. Also featuring among the top ten were the Huffington Post and Fox Digital News Network.

Of the ten most visited sites, CNN came top in terms of the average number of minutes per month spent browsing. Along with Fox, these were the only two sites on this list to surpass 30 minutes per user per month.

Google's users each spent an average of just over 100 minutes on the site during May, while browsers spent 21 minutes per month on Wikipedia - or an average of under one minute per day.

Explore the raw figures in the spreadsheet below, or click the link to download the data.