The renowned internet marketing research company, ComScore has today unveiled its rankings of the largest & fastest-growing Internet properties in Germany, in year 2008. ComScore's rankings are based on data from the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service.

ComScore has reported that the social networking and multimedia sites were among fastest growing online categories in Germany last year. ComScore has ranked social networking sites Yasni. de (No. 1), Facebook. com (No. 2), and Pennergame. de (No. 3) as the fastest growing properties in Germany.

According to ComScore, the number of German Internet users grew 11 percent to 37.6 million visitors in January 2009. The fastest growing site categories were multimedia (up 36 percent to 23.8 million visitors), social networking (up 36 percent to 23.6 million visitors), entertainment (up 30 percent to 29.2 million visitors), and instant messengers (up 25 percent to 19.4 million visitors).

ComScore has articulated that there were gains for the weather, shipping, news/information and gambling categories, while continued traction for the Firefox Web browser helped the Mozilla Organisation grow 72 percent to
7.2 million visitors over the same period.

ComScore has revealed that several properties made notable gains in the Top 25 Property ranking, most notably ProSiebenSat1 Sites, which surged seven places to No. 3, primarily from Web traffic acquisitions, including Billiger. de and Wer-Weiss-Was. de. Other properties that gained in the ranking include Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck (up eight spots to No. 10), Axel Springer AG (up seven spots to No. 14) and Hubert Burda Media (up 17 spots to No. 15).