Also, would you count Amazon's co-branded or "powered by" properties, like Borders.com or Target.com (which was in Compete's top 20) toward their total? If so, along with IMDB, Amazon might be higher than eBay/PayPal.

Combining all their properties, I think the top five in no particular order would be Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay, and Microsoft.

Just for comparison, I found a table of the top 20 US companies by market cap. Guess what? Roughly the same ratio.

http://aol.theonlineinvestor.com/large_cap.phtml

It's almost like there's a 'value' curve that applies to top 20 lists.

The takeaway? It's good to be king!

One reason: the millions of Windows PC's that need to go to Windows Live update each week..

What is very interseting is how the Alexa ratings are very skewed.

What is very interesting, with all the continued bad press Yahoo receives for any negative incident, they are number one on both Alexa and Compete. More important, they have additional properties in the top 20. Google truly does have a long way to go.

Microsoft is also in the top 20 there too, more than once, but I agree with the crossover stats that overstate their rankings.

What I would like to see though is a better comparison of Alexa, Compete, and Hitwise based on the US, English, and World.

Very good post..........

For me, it's not where people go, but what they're engaged in once they get there. A tool is a tool (or website or RIA widget), but it has little intrinsic value unless people use it.

There are a lot of great points in the comments here! John Doe, let me see what I can pull together there, but will take a bit of effort I suspect to do that cross-analysis.

John Doe: Yahoo's bad press only really reaches the type of people who read tech blogs (like this one) or business newspapers, or stock holders. That is--not mainstream users of their site. I doubt the vast majority of Yahoo! Mail users know that COO Dan Rosenwig will be leaving the company, or care who Brad Garlinghouse is or what he said in a memo. As long as the lights stay on at the services they use, they don't care that Yahoo's ad revenue is way lower than Google's or anything else that buzzes around the tech blogosphere.

So it's not really surprising that their traffic is largely unaffected.

David: That's exactly why you do consider them. :)

While we're ruling out default homepages (assuming users are too dumb to change them if they never use the default site)...

Yahoo & Google also change the default homepage when you install any of their software, toolbars, etc.

Plus Firefox default homepage is google.

Another interesting point is that Userplane, which loads enormous amounts of MySpace content (notice how often you see content loading from myspace.presence.userplane.com when you're logged into MySpace) is also an AOL property. Userplane, of course, isn't represented in the statistics, but from the point of view of infrastructure, MySpace is to a significant degree "powered by AOL".

But even so... Yahoo is listed as clear top in the Compete list, with nearly 120 million unique site visitors per month.

Meanwhile, Adobe Flash Player 9, with its fast ActionScript 3 Virtual Machine, is being added to over 150 million new browsers every month.

Flash is bigger than Yahoo...? ;-)

(Most Player installations never result in a site visit, because of the way ActiveX works in Microsoft Internet Explorer.)

jd/adobe

For high ranking sites it does seem pretty accurate.