Recent figures released by comScore highlight the top gaining Web properties, categories, and search engines.
The top gaining property by percentage change in unique visitors in December 2007 from December 2006 was Everyday Health, with a change of 349%. Glam Media was second with a change of 213%, followed by OfficeMax with a change of 199%. Demand Media (149%) and Yellow Book Network (137%) rounded out the top five.
Facebook was seventh on the list with growth of 81%, while craigslist grew 74%. Wikipedia sites grew 34% over that yearlong span.
The total U.S. online population grew 5%, from 174.2 million in December 2006 to 183.6 million in December 2007.
The top gaining category was Politics, with a year-over-year growth of 35%. Community: women was second with a growth of 35%, followed by Entertainment: news, which grew 32%. Classifieds (31%), Career: training and education (31%), Gay/lesbian (28%), Retail: consumer goods (25%), Finance: news/research (20%), Teens (20%), and Religion (20%) rounded out the top 10 list.
Total core search engine queries grew 15%, from 8.3 billion in December 2006 to 9.6 billion in December 2007. Google sites realized the biggest year-over-year growth (30%), handling 5.6 billion queries in December 2007 (64 billion total queries for the entire year), a noticeable rise from the 4.3 billion queries handled in December 2006.
Yahoo sites saw a 4% drop in its queries, while Microsoft sites experienced a growth of 8%. Time Warner network saw a drop of 5%, and Ask network saw an increase of 5%.