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?
