Google’s just released list of “1000 most-visited sites on the web” is a real treat and quite interesting to analyze. It has to be one of the most accurate lists given Google’s massive network reach. The list contains Unique Users (UU) and Page Views (PV). Besides Orkut, Google has not listed any of it’s own sites in the list so Google News, Google Search and GMail may very well be in the top 1000 but absent from this list. I also calculated the Average Page Views (APV) to show how many pages each user visits on average on the site.

Interested readers may view a dynamically sortable table of the complete list of top 1000 most visited sites on the web which also has APV added (Warning: on slow computers it may take a while to load or crash your browser since it’s a long list that requires Javascript processing).

I used it to gather the following data for sites in the News category.

News & Current Events

This category includes sites with an online and television presence, covering current and breaking news.

• BBC (#43) with 45 million UU and 56 APV, the highest in the overall News category
• ifeng.com (#55) in Chinese/Mandarin
• CNN (#64) with 34 million UU and 38 APV
• Digg (#252) is also impressive given that its a community driven news aggregator that runs automatically
• FoxNews (#279) with 11 million UU and 8 APV

Newspapers

This category includes the traditional print newspapers complemented by an online presence

• NYTimes (#83) takes the top spot with 26 million UU and 23 APV
• Yomiuri (#213) with 20 APV
• Daily Mail (#236) with 22 APV
• WSJ (#277) with 15 APV
• Mainichi (#287) with 7 APV
• Guardian (#310) with 16 APV

Business News

• CE.CN (#500) with 7.4 million UU and 5 APV giving it 34 million monthly PV
• Forbes (#633) with 6.1 million UU and 18 APV giving it 110 million monthly PV

Local News

This category includes online news sites which focus on national coverage

• iG.com.br (#477) out of Brazil
• zjol.com.cn (#746) out of China

Social Networks

Of the top 1000 sites, the ones with the highest APV are comprised primarily of social networking sites along with a few classifieds and shopping sites. This makes sense because people spend a lot of time on social networking sites viewing a lot of pages.

Page Views

Facebook is the grand daddy of all websites. Not only does it have the highest number of UU at 540 million, its PV count gets even more impressive with an APV count of 1056. Facebook gets a total of 570 billion page views per month which is more than all the next 30 websites combined! Yahoo web portal is a paltry second with 70 billion page views from it’s 490 million unique users.