eBay, Amazon and Apple get most visitors from outside U.S., new study says

The majority of visitors by far to top U.S. web sites, including eBay, Amazon, Apple Computer, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, log on from outside the U.S., comScore Networks Inc. says in a new report on the number of unique Internet visitors during September.

Google and Wikipedia.com share the lead with the highest percentage of outside-U.S. visitors at 79.8%, followed by Microsoft, 79%, Apple Computer, 70.8%, and eBay, 70.4%.

ComScore based its study on worldwide traffic to the top 25 U.S. web properties based on their volume of U.S. web traffic. The study excluded traffic from public computers, such as in Internet cafes, and from mobile phones and PDAs.

Among other web properties in the study, the percentage of outside-U.S. visitors at Amazon was 66.4%; Verizon Communications, 15.5%; AT&T, 14.4%; Walmart.com, 20.8%; and Target Corp., 9.4%.

"As Internet usage outside the U.S. has grown rapidly from a small base, the U.S. share of the world’s online population has fallen from 65 % to less than 25% in the last 10 years," says Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe.

Following is a partial list from the study of total unique September visitor totals, worldwide/U.S. (in thousands):
Yahoo Sites, 480,641/115,726
Microsoft Sites, 505,479/106,270
Google Sites, 467,498/94,582
Ask Network, 112,768/48,043
Amazon Sites, 133,518/44,924
Verizon Communications, 37,950/32,059
Apple Computer, 94,909/27,686
Walmart.com, 28,762/22,774