Surprisingly enough, it is Microsoft and its portal of websites that were at the top of the heap with an average of 3,920 hours. Not only did visitors spend more time on Microsoft websites, but the number of these visitors increased 43% from last year.

Google actually led the pack with a 48% percentage gain, but still lagged behind Microsoft significantly in time spent with an average of 2,512.

Yahoo, AOL and Fox all saw declines in time spent on their sites, with Fox suffering an abysmal decrease of 44%.

Of course, the report doesn’t track what visitors spent their time doing on the sites or why they visited in the first place, but it still serves as a good barometer for portal popularity. Microsoft, especially, with Adcenter being a very affordable PPC alternative, looks to be a good source of content leads for any marketing campaign.