Summer Concerts and Back to school Fashion drive Internet Traffic

(Relaxnews) - As consumers turned their thoughts to leisure activities through the summer months and students (and their parents) started to get prepared for the back-to-school rush, web activity in the US surged in the categories of Tickets, Consumer Goods and Apparel during July.

"Ticket sites were popular in July as Americans looked to make the most out of their summer at concerts, sports and other events,"said Jeff Hackett, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. "Many parents took advantage of early back-to-school promotions at Consumer Goods and Apparel sites, which experienced a significant spike in traffic."

ComScore's July Media Metrics web properties ranking for the US identified Ticket sites as one of the fastest growing categories on the web in July. Close to 26 million people browsed sites in the category, looking for tickets for summer concerts, events and entertainment — a 23 percent increase from June.

Traffic to Consumer Goods sites grew by 13 percent during the month, reaching 25.6 million people.

The Apparel sites category also experienced increased activity, up 8 percent to 66 million visitors.

Overall, Google Sites retained the number one position in comScore's Top 50 property list with 182.1 million visitors in July. Yahoo! Sites and Microsoft Sites ranked second and third with 177.6 million visitors and 174.3 million visitors respectively.

Ask Network moved up one place on the ranking, bumping Glam Media from from eighth position.

During the month of July social networking sites Twitter and Facebook both experienced their highest number of visitors yet; Facebook drew in a huge 162 million visitors (up from 160.8 in June) and Twitter saw a record 32.8 million visitors (an increase of just over 2 million visitors from June).

ComScore's Top 10 Properties in the US for the month of July 2011:

    Google Sites – 182.2 million visitors
    Yahoo! Sites – 177.6 million
    Microsoft Sites – 174.3 million
    Facebook.com – 162.1 million
    AOL, Inc. – 105.4 million
    Amazon Sites – 97.1 million
    Turner Digital – 91.2 million
    Ask Network – 84.9 million
    Glam Media – 81.6 million
    Viacom Digital – 79.3 million