Apple's iTunes pips Google's growth

Music fans flooding iTunes last month helped Apple outpace Google and Amazon as the fastest-growing website among the top 10 best-known online brands, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Traffic-reporting service Nielsen/NetRatings said traffic to Apple.com rose from 19.6 million unique visitors in November 2004 to 30.8 million last month - a 57 per cent jump. The number of visitors to online search engine Google climbed by 29 per cent, while traffic to retailer Amazon grew 16 per cent.

MapQuest - which provides free maps, driving directions and traffic reports - came in fourth with a 13 per cent increase, and online media site Real Networks got the fifth highest jump with 12 per cent. Yahoo!, which saw a 10 per cent increase in traffic from a year ago, drew the largest audience, with 104 million visitors during the month.

November is the month when consumers begin to boost their internet surfing in anticipation of the holidays, and analysts closely watch traffic figures to project holiday spending, said Gerry Davidson, a senior media analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings.

Much of the rapid growth at Apple and Google is due to their frequent release of new products, features and services, which continuously churns up new interest for the sites, Davidson said.

For example, this autumn Apple launched the iPod nano, the latest version of the company's ubiquitous digital music player. To download music for their new players, iPod owners flocked to iTunes on the Apple website (Nielsen/NetRatings did not specify how many visitors came to download the iTunes software and how many came to purchase songs from the Music Store). Apple also recently made podcasts and video downloads available on iTunes. In the past year, Google has unveiled a slew of new services.

Davidson said: "We saw the introduction of Google Maps and Google Earth. They are far outpacing the growth of the overall site. The site has seen particular increases from Froogle [a shopping comparison area on Google] and image search over the past year."

When it came to the highest traffic growth among all websites, the companies that cater to teens and young adults fared best.

Topping the list was photo-hosting site PhotoBucket.com, which saw 15.6 million visitors last month, up 1,492 per cent from the 983,000 visitors in November 2004. Social-networking sites MySpace, Facebook and Memegen.net also saw impressive year-over-year growth, increasing 752 per cent, 530 per cent and 446 per cent, respectively, according to the Nielsen/NetRatings' report.

Greg Sandoval writes for CNET News.com