Sure, Yahoo might be second in search (which is still, in and of itself, pretty good), but the company is far from a has-been — I know a ton of startups that would kill for the eyeballs that it snags in many of its market categories, and some established companies (Google, AOL, Microsoft, to name a few) that would love them, too.

In CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo finally has a messenger: someone to remind the world that there is more to the company than just search. In a May 2009 interview with CNBC Silicon Valley bureau chief Jim Goldman, Bartz got heated when he said something about Yahoo “picking up the scraps in the marketplace“:

We aren’t picking anything up…We are the market we are in. We are very very good in providing people with the information and content they need. We are not a search company…You don’t go to Google to find out what’s happening in the financial world. You don’t go to Google to connect up with groups that you are interested in. You don’t go to Google to get the headline news of the moment. That’s not what happens there…We’ve got the No. 1 finance site, news site, sports site, No. 1 mail by two times in the world, our Messenger is big, Answers we are No. 1.

Well, OK then. Just how big are Yahoo’s various properties? We reached out to comScore to get some idea on how dominant the company is in its various markets:

Yahoo News is the No. 1 news and information site in the country, with more than 50 million monthly unique readers, ahead of The New York Times network’s 45 million.

Yahoo Finance has more than 20 million monthly unique readers, well ahead of AOL Money’s 14 million.

Yahoo Sports beats the competition with almost 25 million monthly users. ESPN is No. 2 with 21 million.

Yahoo’s OMG! entertainment page scored more than double the traffic — more than 20 million monthly unique users — of its nearest competitor, AOL’s TMZ, in May. TMZ had just shy of 10 million visitors.

Yahoo Games is in a near tie with EA Online, though it has strong tie-ins to EA’s video game franchises like the Sims 3. Both companies had more than 19 million unique visitors in June, with Nickelodeon Casual Games — a more direct Yahoo Games competitor — logging 17.5 million unique visitors.

Yahoo Mail demolishes the competition, grabbing two-thirds of the total webmail market with 103 million unique visitors. Hotmail had almost 48 million, with AOL and Google lagging behind with 38 million and 36 million visitors, respectively.

Flickr, Answers, Music, TV and Movies also do very well in their categories.

With all the focus on search, it’s easy to forgot that this is also what Microsoft was trying to buy in Yahoo. Here are the actual numbers from a few choice categories:

News/Information Total Unique Visitors Yahoo! News 51,192,000 New York Times Digital 44,789,000 CNN 35,119,000 News/Research Total Unique Visitors Yahoo! Finance 20,083,000 AOL Money & Finance 14,058,000 MSN Money 11,240,000 Sports Total Unique Visitors Yahoo! Sports 24,776,000 ESPN 20,984,000 FOXSports.com on MSN 12,576,000 Email Total Unique Visitors Yahoo! Mail 103,755,000 Windows Live Hotmail 47,709,000 AOL Email 38,057,000 Google Gmail 36,649,000

(All data courtesy of ComScore, and is valid for June 2009, unless otherwise stated.)

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