Google, Facebook top digital views: Nielsen

Google was the most-visited U.S. Web brand, and Facebook held its lead among social networks and blogs in 2011, according to year-end ratings by the Nielsen company.

Also, smartphones became even more popular last year, making up most of new phone purchases, with Apple as the top smartphone manufacturer and Android as the leading Operating System.

Last year, Google attracted 153,441,000 unique visitors per month, Nielsen said, following by Facebook with 137,644,000 unique visitors per month.

The rest of the top-10 digital sites were, in order, Yahoo!, Bing, YouTube, Microsoft, AOL, Wikipedia, Apple and Ask.com, according to Nielsen, which reviewed the top online destinations, social media sites, and smartphone devices.