When comScore reported on Thursday that Yahoo was the No. 1 most-visited website in the country—overtaking Google for the first time in two years—I admit I was surprised.
It wasn't the Tumblr Effect. comScore counted Tumblr traffic separately—the microblogging site hovered at No. 28 in July. So if none of your friends use Yahoo, who does? A comScore spokesperson told TechHive the jump wasn't attributable to any particular reason—rather, many of Yahoo's sites, or channels, saw traffic increases.
Powerful publicity stunts
I'm willing to bet Yahoo Mail saw a significant jump in July—that's when Yahoo announced its plans to recycle inactive email accounts. Users who probably hadn't visited Yahoo in months, even years, were encouraged to revive their accounts or reserve new screennames. No figures are available following that media blitz, but it's a sure bet that users flocked to Yahoo to reserve names that had to sound better than the random words paired with a series of numbers that characterized many Yahoo accounts in the early aughts ("softballchick345678," anyone?).
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