Google, Facebook Top List of 2011's Most Visited Sites

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Facebook and Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) were the three most visited web brands in 2011, according to new data from Nielsen.

The favored search engine saw more than 153.4 million unique visitors per month this year, while Facebook had 137.6 million and Yahoo had 130.1 million. Bing and YouTube rounded out the top five.

The data, taken from January through October, ranked the number of first-time visitors to these sites from home and work computers.

Also featured on the top-ten list were Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Wikipedia and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL).

By social networks and blogs, Facebook continued to dominate the market by a large margin, with Blogger and Twitter following far behind it with 45.7 million and 23.6 million unique visitors, respectively. Google+, started this year as a direct rival to Facebook, saw 8.2 million visitors, coming in at No. 8 on the list behind LinkedIn (NASDAQ:LNKD), Myspace and WordPress. YouTube continued to dominate against other video sites, with 111.15 million visitors. Hulu fell to No. 7 with just 13.2 million visitors and Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), which lost nearly a million customers earlier this year after raising prices, just made the list with 7.42 million visitors.

As smartphones continued to become more popular this year, Apple continued to dominate the market with 29% of the market share, followed by HTC with 21%, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM) with 17%. Samsung and Motorola rounded out the top five.