Top 20 Websites in US
Web metrics firm Compete has an interesting post, outlining the top 20 websites (for US traffic). According to Compete, all 20 of them got over 20 million unique visitors in October 2006. Here is the chart:
A couple of people noted in the comments that if you add Microsoft's 4 top 20 properties together (msn.com, live.com, microsoft.com and passport.net), then they would probably be number 1. However a counter to that is that a lot of passport.net domains currently re-direct to live.com. I think there may be some crossover between live.com and MSN too. So it may well be that Yahoo remains number 1, even accounting for Microsoft's multiple brands. Plus of course Yahoo and Google both have separately branded properties too - e.g. Flickr, YouTube. If I was to estimate, I'd put Microsoft at number 2 overall - but interested to hear what others think.
Compete notes that Adobe.com, Live.com, Wikipedia.org and YouTube.com are new to the top 20 over the past year, while Expedia.com, Monster.com, Paypal.com and Weather.com have all dropped out.
Looking at the Alexa data for US traffic, the top 20 is quite different:
1. yahoo.com
2. google.com
3. myspace.com
4. msn.com
5. ebay.com
6. amazon.com
7. youtube.com
8. craigslist.org
9. wikipedia.org
10. cnn.com
11. facebook.com
12. go.com
13. live.com
14. blogger.com
15. aol.com
16. microsoft.com
17. comcast.net
18. imdb.com
19. digg.com
20. flickr.com
The Alexa list is (I think) only counting US traffic, but it is quite different from Compete's stats. The presence of non-mainstream web 2.0 sites in Alexa's top 20 (blogger.com, digg, flickr) suggests that the traffic is heavily skewed towards technical users - which makes sense, given Alexa relies on toolbar downloads to get their stats.
Also interesting to note there is just one Microsoft property in the top 10 in Alexa, compared to 3 for Compete.
Any other trends you can spot from this data?
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I find it odd that PayPal isn't list in either company's top 20 when eBay is 5th in both.
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.
Why do people visit microsoft.com? What is there that is of use?
go.com? geocities still alive?
I wonder whether Apple's iTunes Store is tracked that way since all the traffic (both catalog browsing and music/movie downloading) is going through the custom browser integrated in the application... I wonder how they would fare...
I'm kind of surprised by the dropoff from #1 to #20-- about 1/5 as much traffic.
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!
Brent,
One reason: the millions of Windows PC's that need to go to Windows Live update each week..
VERY INTERSTING and VERY GOOD POST, but the author might consider a more descriptive title or not.
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..........
You asked whether other patterns or trends were evident. I look at this list and see behaviors based upon the sites visited: browse / search, buy, research, connecting via social networks (MySpace, digg, Blogger).
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.
I must admit go.com was really the only one in the two lists that had me scratching my head. They're owned by Disney, which means they are part of an established media brand. Still, they were largely unfamiliar with me.
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.
Emre: GeoCities is owned by Yahoo! now. That had me scratching my head too (I hadn't heard much from that site since 1999), but I think Yahoo! runs their hosting services through GeoCities... which explains that.
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.
I think it is somewhat unfair to consider microsoft.com, live.com, and msn.com. All of these are brought up as defaults occasionally by Microsoft - MSN is the default for IE. This means that many people pull it up de facto, and then move to a new page.
Just some info on go.com - I was wondering about that, too, but then I realized that both abc.com and espn.com both redirect to abc.go.com and espn.go.com respectively. There might be others, but both those sites probably drive a lot of traffic to the go.com domain.
Frederic: Also Disney.com >> disney.go.com ... Most of Disney's web properties use a Go.com subdomain, I believe.
David: That's exactly why you do consider them. :)
@ #11
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.
If you add AOL.com and Mapquest.com (Mapquest is an AOL property), AOL may surpass both Yahoo! and Microsoft.
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".
I didn't know digg was on the top 20...interesting.
Trivia note: These stats are for unique site visitors per month, as projected from two million Windows users who install Compete Toolbar. These projections may or may not match actual site logs, or other public tracking mechanisms. (Alexa doesn't seem to rank its list only by unique visitors.)
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
I just noticed a post on the official Alexa blog comparing Alexa data to info from stat counters in use on sites (they use publicly available SiteMeter stats from TechCrunch overlayed with an Alexa graph): http://awis.blogspot.com/2006/11/i-have-new-hobby.html
For high ranking sites it does seem pretty accurate.
Josh, I noticed that too. Alexa is usually a pretty good match for site trends - which can also be useful when disproving some of the more ridiculous stats claims that some blogs make!
In the Alexa list... arent msn and live both microsoft properties?
Surprise craiglist is 8th thought they would be higher