Washington Post – There’s some good news for Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer: Yahoo topped Google in Web traffic for the first time since May 2011.
Research firm comScore reported Yahoo logged 196.6 million unique visitors in July, compared with its rival’s 192.3 million.
The bump in traffic should be encouraging news for Mayer, a Google alum who has focused on overhauling Yahoo’s image in the year since she took the helm at the technology giant. When Mayer started at Yahoo last July, the company trailed Google by 5 million page views — with 163 million unique visitors to Google’s 190 million — and was fighting public perception that it would never catch up.
Yahoo slowly narrowed the gap with Google this year as Mayer focused on overhauling the company’s Web properties, such as its e-mail service and the photo-sharing site Flickr.
“Those things matter,” said Andrew Lipsman, an analyst for comScore. “When a company can re-engage or re-spark interest, it has ancillary benefits” across the network.
Google and Yahoo are likely to continue to fight it out for the top spot, Lipsman said. For Yahoo, the numbers are particularly impressive because they do not include the firm’s acquisition of blogging site Tumblr, he said. If July’s numbers had included traffic to Tumblr, Yahoo would have seen about 6 million additional users, he said.
