Yahoo Tops Google In August

comScore Media Metrix released today its monthly breakdown of U.S. consumer online activity at popular online sites for the month of August.

With students and teachers returning to school in late August education sites saw strong growth for the month. The training and education category grew by 15 percent to over 12 million visitors, making it the top-gaining category for the month. College resource site Fastweb led the category with 2.5 million visitors, followed by The College Board with close to 1.9 million visitors and Nellnet, an education planning and financing company with 1.4 million visitors.

With the start of fall sports and football season, traffic to retail sports/outdoors sites increased 7 percent to more than 29 million visitors. Foot Locker Sites saw a 15 percent gain to 4.6 million visitors to lead the category, trailed by eBay Sports U.S. with 4 million visitors and DicksSportingGoods.com with 2.6 million visitors. NFL Internet Group, which includes NFL team sites, rose 78 percent to over 14 million visitors, making it one of the top gaining properties in August.

Multi-state lotteries Mega Millions and Powerball both had large jackpots in August causing lotto sites to rise 8 percent to more than 31 million visitors for the month. Powerball.com was up 123 percent with 2.3 million visitors and Megamillions.com saw its traffic spike by 100 percent with 1.1 million visitors.

The top properties for the month of August remained unchanged, as Yahoo sites led with 135 million unique monthly visitors, followed by Google sites with 128 million and the Time Warner Network with 124 million unique monthly visitors.