ComScore released its monthly analysis of web activity for March today which found that Yahoo is edging in on Google in terms of traffic and that Spring fever also extends to the digital world.

Google sites were the top web property with March with 192 million visitors, but Yahoo came in a close second with 191 million. Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon took third, fourth, and fifth place with 166 million, 148 million, and 121 million visitors, respectively.

The total audience for March came in at nearly 223 unique visitors, which is 1.5 million more than the previous month. Yahoo gained 5 million visitors while Google gained 2 million. Interestingly, AOL’s visit count rose by 21 million. In other news, Facebook’s unique visitors declined by 4 million.

March’s web activity was largely driven by seasonal concerns. Pharmacy sites saw a 23 percent increase in March as people sought out treatment for seasonal allergies and colds. March is also Spring Break month, and “Teen and Toy” sites saw spikes in traffic as parents looked for ways to entertain their kids and teens had additional spare time to spend online. Disney Online jumped six positions in ComScore’s rankings.

March was, of course, prime sport season and ESPN also shot ahead, along with Major League Baseball and SB Nation sites. The audience to the MLB’s site rose by 34 percent from February to March. Spring is also a time for spring cleaning and home improvement, and Lowes and Proctor & Gamble also increased their audience by 34 percent each.

In the ad world, ShareThis dominated “Ad Focus” entities, followed by Outbrain, Yahoo, and Google. Google Ad Network topped the list of advertising networks and buy side networks, with Specific Media, Federated Media, and AOL Advertising coming in behind.

What will April bring? A spike in matzah and marijuana themed websites?

ComScore is a digital measurement and analytics company that releases a ranking of the Top 50 U.S. Web Properties every month, as well as other reports on web, mobile, and TV consumer behavior.

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Online advertising, for one thing, was way up, with almost six trillion display ads published in 2012. That’s up 500 billion from 2011. Shockingly, AT&T accounted for a massive 1.04 billion of them, more than double the next largest online advertiser, Microsoft, which bought almost 50 billion impressions.

ComScore’s massive report also includes data on the top web properties, the battle for search dominance between Google and Bing, and smartphone market share, among other things.

Facebook, for instance, is the most popular app on phones in America, according to ComScore, showing up on 76 percent of phones. That’s impressive, but not as impressive as Google’s utter domination of the mobile charts. The search engine/social network/advertising giant has no less than five of the top six mobile apps in the U.S. Google’s apps such as Maps, Google Play, Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube take positions two through six.

In terms of top sites, Google retained leadership in terms of unique visitors, with over 191 million. That’s just six million more than Yahoo, which is still — perhaps surprisingly — strong in online services and information, and over 20 million more than Microsoft.

But Facebook takes the cake in terms of time share: almost 11 percent of all time spent online, is spent on Facebook.

Here’s a visual selection of the report’s findings:

Image credits: ComScore

According to Nielsen’s August 2012 statistics for the U.S., YouTube alone had more than triple the unique visitors of any other site, more than 25 times the number of video streams than its nearest competitor, and more time per viewer than any service other than Netflix.

It’s really not a competition.

This mirrors the results from ComScore’s July 2012 results in some ways, in which Google held a 3-to-1 advantage over nearest competitor Facebook in terms of unique video viewers (156 million to 53 million). But Nielsen’s methodologies and numbers differ from  ComScore’s, and in Nielsen’s numbers for this month, Facebook trails Google unique visitors by almost 6-to-1: 138 million to 25 million.

(VentureBeat has reached out to Nielsen for comment, and we’ll update this story as we get an answer.)

TV is moving online, as we covered recently, especially via game consoles like the Xbox 360, set-top boxes, and smart TVs. Viewers on those platforms watch far more minutes than viewers on phones, PCs, or even tablets, and that’s where both Hulu and especially Netflix see the majority of their minutes.

Other data from Nielsen show that Netflix remains the queen of engagement, with viewers watching an average of 10.5 of Netflix content each month, compared to not quite five hours for YouTube, and 4.5 for Hulu.

One brand that shows consistent viewership between both the Nielsen and ComScore ratings is VEVO, with something like 45 million unique visitors a month to its music videos.

But the most obvious finding?

Anyone who wants to catch YouTube has their work cut out for them.

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Old people are big on the web, apparently, as AARP web properties jumped 21 percent, Sun Microsystems has risen from the dead, and MySpace continues its slow drop to oblivion as Tumblr elbows its way above yesterday’s social network.

But the biggest jump belongs to Instagram.

The Facebook acquisition and continued execution by the Instagram team translated to 38 percent growth in the month of July. Instagram.com is now the 56th most popular site in the U.S., with 22.7 million unique visitors, up from 16.5 million in June.

And that’s all with a website that contains almost no content besides a blog and developer support, unless you come in via the app or a social network to see an Instagrammed picture directly.

One big surprise in the top gainers: Sun Microsystems.

Apparently it grew 32 percent from 7.7 million to 10.2 million visitors, despite being dead, and sun.com redirecting to Oracle’s website. This is a headscratcher — Sun has been a popular website in the past, but why it is gaining now, and how ComScore is finding this are big question marks.

I asked ComScore for more information, and this is what Andrew Lipsman, the company’s VP of industry analysis, told me:

Sun Microsystems is the web property, and it would include a number of other sites for products that Sun owns. There may have been a software update this month that drove traffic to something under the Sun umbrella.

Tumblr continues to win as it surged past MySpace as the 43rd most popular site in the U.S., and the top slots are held down by the big boys: Google with 190 million uniques, Microsoft with 168 million, Yahoo with 162 million, and Facebook with 160 million.

The next big move is probably Facebook surging past Yahoo and Microsoft sites.

Here’s the top gainers graph:

ComScore top 10 gaining websites July 2012

And the top sites overall:

ComScore July 2012: top websites in the US

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Hat tip: MarketingLand

Beyond that, Facebook is now number two, and Hulu is quite obviously Queen of Ads.

Google sites had a total viewership of 157 million viewers in July, up from 154.5 million in June, and they watched almost 37 million videos. And each user watched an astounding average of 525 minutes — also up from 1,238 minutes last month.

That compares to 53 million unique viewers on Facebook, 49 million on Yahoo, and 45 million on VEVO. And the minutes per viewer for those networks are much lower as well: 22 minutes/month on Facebook, 70 minutes on Yahoo, and 46 minutes on VEVO.

Facebook: We’re number two!

The other piece of news: Facebook is now second, up from third last week. Facebook’s growth is not shocking — the shocking part is that with almost a billion users, only 53 million are watching videos.

I would expect this number to rise over time, but it will have to triple to start challenging Google and YouTube.

One thing that may not change quickly: the average number of minutes viewed on Facebook. At 22 minutes per viewer, it’s a fraction of YouTube’s 525 minutes, and a function of the type of videos being shared. The average person can only watch so many cats, babies, and Little League clips and stay sane.

Hulu: queen of ads

And finally, here’s an interesting tidbit: Hulu has a much higher percentage of ads than any other video network. This isn’t surprising, perhaps — Hulu is, after all, owned by the big traditional media networks NBC, Disney, and News Corp.

But with a fraction of the videos and viewer-minutes of YouTube, it somehow manages to jam in almost three times the number of ads: 521 minutes of ads on Hulu to 166 ad minutes on Google.

Here’s the full ComScore list by unique viewers:

Source: ComScore

Top U.S. Online Video Content Properties

And the list by video ads viewed:

Source: ComScore

Top 10 Video Ad Properties by Video Ads Viewed

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