August Website Rankings (GOOG, MSFT, YHOO, FB, AOL, AMZN, CMCSA, WMT, TGT, VZ)

Digital media research firm comScore Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) has released its ranking of the top 50 U.S. web properties for August and the list is topped, once again, by the usual suspects. comScore counted a total audience of unique website visitors of more than 220 million, about two-thirds of the total U.S. population, and about 1 million fewer than the total July count.

Leading the pack are sites owned by Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) with more than 187 million unique visitors. Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) is second with about 170 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) with about 164 million, Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) with about 152 million, and Aol Inc. (NYSE: AOL) with 113 million. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) was sixth with about 104 million, and no other properties broke the 100 million mark.

Compared with July’s data, Facebook’s unique visitor count was down by about 9 million, and Google had about 3 million fewer unique visitors in August. AOL’s count rose by 3 million, while the others were about the same, give or take a million visitors. Due to a change in comScore’s methodology, the August counts may not be quite comparable to the July count.

Some interesting tidbits from the research:

• Comcast Corp. (NASDAQ: CMCSA), without help from the Olympic Games, fell out of the top ten sites, to 16th.
• Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT), in 25th place, and Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT), at 49th place, are the only traditional retailers to make the list.
• Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) in 39th place last month fell out of the top 50 sites.

The research firm also made some changes to its measurement of display advertising ecosystems. Among syndicated comScore Ad Focus entities, the ‘Share This’ platform led with an 87% reach to Americans online, with Google at 81.6% reach, Yahoo at 74.3% reach, and Facebook at 69.2% reach.

comScore’s press announcement is available here.

Paul Ausick