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The most popular web sites every year since 1996
- biomimic 12y agoSearch is still #1.
- gpvos 12y ago> Mostly, however, the list is garbage nonsense like “GNN” and “Teleport,” which we don’t even know what they are. Funny. Just before opening the page I was thinking about how high GNN would feature on the list. The web site is actually still the first entry on the Wikipedia GNN page.
- notahacker 12y agoThat sentence from the article is - on several levels - a sad reflection on the "garbage nonsense" standards of drafting and editing within the clickbait-generating arm of the Washington Post.
- dm03514 12y agointernet porn was centralized enough in 1996 to be only year that it made top 20??
- josefresco 12y agoPossibly. I would guess however that it's more of a problem with how data is reported. Here's what comScore has to say about their methodology: "This approach (comScore) combines person-level measurement from the 2 million person comScore global panel with census informed tonnage of consumption to account for 100 percent of a property's audience." https://www.google.com/search?q=comscore+methodology https://www.google.com/search?q=comscore+methodology
- lpsz 12y agoSurprised to see Ask still on the list. I haven't personally browsed there since maybe y2k. Not to be facetious, but I imagine a whole segment of users unaware of Google (or DDG, or another sensible modern alternative) and still relying on Ask.
- josefresco 12y agoThe "Ask" toolbar is bundled with a lot of crapware. Could explain the inflated numbers. I doubt any Ask users don't know of Google - more like they don't know how to switch, or don't need/want to.
- Kurtz79 12y agoIt it was so it wouldn't be a big problem, but in reality it is bundled even with supposedly respectable software: https://www.change.org/p/oracle-corporation-stop-bundling-ask-toolbar-with-the-java-installer https://www.change.org/p/oracle-corporation-stop-bundling-as... I'm always suprised when I open a browser of some collegues/friends with even moderate computer literacy and see the amount of crap they let automatic installers shovel into their PCs, and how they are mostly not bothered by it.
- desdiv 12y agoI really don't understand why Oracle, a company that rakes in almost $40 billion a year, is begging for pocket change from Ask Jeeves. Someone please explain this to me.
- dummyfellow 12y agoIt is there since Sun days, which wasn't raking anything. Also as a division, Java makes almost no revenue.
- pbhjpbhj 12y agoIsn't Ask Toolbar a sneak install [read fraudulent misrepresentation] with Adobe [PDF] Viewer?
- fmitchell0 12y agoi'm confused. what/why is gannett (in 2013)?
- justignore 12y agoGannett is a large media holding company. They own/license a number of news stations, but more importantly, own USA Today.
- listic 12y agoDo they count visitors to their actual website? I think not.
- angersock 12y agoI'm rather surprised--which is to say, calling bullshit--that no porn sites (any of the $TUBE network) shows up on this.
- Dirlewanger 12y agoProbably because most of the data comes from comScore who, like Alexa, gets their data from a self-selected sample size. We're ever going to get truly accurate results this way. Of course, I'm sure if the NSA put its mind to it (not happening), they could get a fairly accurate readout of the most popular sites for the US...
- angersock 12y agoI wonder how you'd collect that...log every DNS lookup at the ISP level? Surely they already do this.
- evandena 12y agoI don't have an answer for you, but a simple DNS lookup at the ISP wouldn't get you the whole picture. Lot's of local/LAN DNS caching.
- pkhagah 12y agoProbably count tcp/http connection to sites at ISP? Of course it's not easy or accurate for us. Not NSA ;) Another option for conspiracy theorists is to just get data from apache logs etc., because, you know, NSA has access to everything.
- blumkvist 12y agoYou don't need the NSA to get that info. There are plenty of companies who aggregate data from ISPs.
- new299 12y agoReally? Does that data get made available in market reports?
- dpweb 12y agoI remember first seeing a Yahoo TV commercial. Was like, Yahoo is big enough to have a TV commercial?!!
- sp332 12y agoYahoo owns $34B of Ali Baba, which is doing crazy well right now and taking Yahoo up with it.
- rancherito 12y agoI remember thinking the same thing. Still impressive they're as high as they are today considering I haven't used it in years.
- macNchz 12y agoGlam Media? #7 in 2013, on the list since 2008. Never heard of them, and I'm struggling to figure out what their deal is. Seems they've recently raised a series G round of funding, and have an array of web properties that I can't really find a list of, the primary ones being http://www.glam.com http://www.glam.com and http://www.brash.com http://www.brash.com, which are shockingly useless marketing vehicles that I really can't believe anyone would visit on a regular basis. Anyone have any insight?
- fjarlq 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_Media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_Media
- spullara 12y agoI do hope they named themselves after the company in Ugly Betty on purpose.
- macNchz 12y agoNot an especially informative wikipedia page as it mostly discusses the company's accomplishments with a bit of a PR flavor. No list of their 'over 4000 blogs and lifestyle websites'. Per the wiki, they've raised over $300 million in venture capital and get hundreds of millions of unique visitors...but it just surprises me that I hadn't heard of them and all the info about them just reads like marketing babble.
- icpmacdo 12y agohaha I have never heard of a company getting to a series G round, what is the farthest down the alphabet a serious venture backed company has gone?
- npkarnik 12y agoPalantir seems to have stopped lettering their rounds after G. Though I'm not sure about the distinction between a $400 million Private Equity raise and a $1.2 billion "Series E" a la Uber
- zhte415 12y agoTencent, Baidu? This seems to ignore obvious big players.
- wcchandler 12y agoLooks like they used comscore for the bulk of their sources -- which only looked at US traffic to "web properties."
- listic 12y ago> "web properties." Is it a set of web sites? Looks likely, e.g. Microsoft has aggregated 'Microsoft' and 'MSN' for a boost in overall rating, in 1999.
- listic 12y agoThough probably most exhaustive (which other metric will measure Web stats from Feb. 1996 on?) it looks _very_ US-centric in my view. While US=World in terms on internet coverage early on, it is certainly not true now, and will become ever more untrue in the future. This list certainly ignores _many_ 'elefants in the room'; those who try to rely solely on it for high-level overview of development of the internet, will have a distorted view. I won't bother listing the others because my view is biased, too, and I'll obviously won't think of many. Just FYI: Russian Liveinternet counter, unique daily visitors: http://www.liveinternet.ru/rating/index.html?lang=en http://www.liveinternet.ru/rating/index.html?lang=en
- afro88 12y agoI'm genuinely surprised that Yahoo tops Google in 2013 and 2010. Especially considering Android, Gmail etc. proliferation on top of it's domination of search
- vidarh 12y agoOn top of their long list of Yahoo branded services, consider that they own Tumblr and Flickr. And Gmail is not nearly as dominant outside of the tech industry as it is within. There are many markets where Gmail is beaten by one or more of Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL.
- wuliwong 12y agoThis is supposed to be a list of the top "websites". A visit to tumblr.com or to flickr.com should not be counted for yahoo.com. I think the title of the article is probably not accurate.
- nostrademons 12y agoThe article says that it's based on comScore, which groups all properties owned by one company under that company. So really "top web companies."
- js-coder 12y agoStill really surprising for me. I would've thought Google search alone would easily outperform all of Yahoo. And then Google also has YouTube, GMail, Maps etc.
- nostrademons 12y agoI think the comScore data may be biased; IIRC they rely on a toolbar that's installed along with crapware, and so it'll be biased toward users who are willing to put up with crapware.
- noblethrasher 12y agoNow we just need a list of the most popular Internet applications of the last 10 - 15 years. I suspect that the web is still the largest non-proprietary application (perhaps followed by email), but it would be nice to see how it compares to the others.
- ozh 12y agoWTF is doing AOL in the top list nowadays? Genuine question.
- organsnyder 12y agoHuffington Post
- Igglyboo 12y agoTechCrunch
- wlesieutre 12y agoEngadget
- ozh 12y agoI must be seriously underestimating the pageviews of those websites then :)
- adventured 12y agoAOL.com is still a top ~100 property in the US. Not sure why, maybe sponsored starting homepages, people checking old email accounts, etc.
- nickhalfasleep 12y agoIn some ways this is deceptive in a smartphone world, if you consider all the networked Apps that also vie for "connected" screen time.
- sehr 12y agoDo you mean using an in app browser? Those hits still count IIRC
- lukejduncan 12y agoApp actions can still count as "pageviews" in a comscore world. I'm not entirely sure of the specifics but I've heard of it being reported.
- flurpitude 12y agoYahoo the most popular, AOL 5th and Glam Media 7th in 2013? There's something fishy about these rankings.
- valarauca1 12y agoYahoo owns Tumblr and Flickr as well as its core company doing fine. AOL owns Tech Crunch and Huffington post.. As well as their core business remains profitable (2.3 billion in revenue last year). Google is only largely popular with the <30 age demo and the tech centric crowd. You have to remember your social circle isn't always representative of the country.
- bshimmin 12y agoGoogle search is so popular it's a verb amongst almost any age group, at least in the west. I'm still struggling to believe that Yahoo beats Google even with this somewhat nebulous "web properties" definition. Does Yahoo.com (including, say, news and weather?) + Tumblr + Flickr really get more traffic than Google.com + Google Maps + YouTube?
- shawndumas 12y agoComScore's numbers reflect unique visitors and not visits.
- mda 12y agoJust shows how terrible comscore is at measuring.
- yc1010 12y agoDelighted to see Ebay losing out to Amazon, their terrible site design/layout + all sorts of Paypal horror stories must have driven millions of users away
- ryandvm 12y agoAs far as innovation is concerned, Ebay and Amazon are two of the most polar opposite companies on the web. Amazon started as an online book store. They now sell consumer products, media, tablets, payment services, computing services, content production, logistics, supply services, drone deliveries, etc. On the other hand, Ebay started as an online auction site. Since then, they have... bought the payment processor that most of their customers used. The only other category leader that has possibly been more stagnant than Ebay is Craigslist.
- imanaccount247 12y agoCraigslist at least didn't make huge efforts to lower the quality of their site over the years. Ebay went from useful to garbage almost entirely by choice.
- newsreporter 12y agoagreed completely.
- freshyill 12y agoFascinating.
- briholt 12y agoIt's not clear from the graphic or the article, but the list of top "sites" is actually the top networks - showing all of the network's sites' traffic is aggregated together. So "Fox" represents traffic from IGN.com and Myspace.com as well.
- chrislgrigg 12y agoWhen I started looking through this, I wondered if any of the early-2000s adware platforms would make an appearance... and there it was! Gator at #17 in 2001. I was working at the tech bench at Best Buy in high school and removal of it and the other adware apps of that era must have been 75% of my job.
- Thaxll 12y agoThis list is completely bias, there is no way that Facebook is behind Microsoft in 2013. Something that looks more real: http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US
- megaman22 12y agoBing is behind the german version of Google globally...
- BobMarz 12y agoCBS, Turner, Weather Co, Comcast NBC, and Gannett are all solidly old media. NBC and CBS got started with radio broadcasts in the 20s! Who says old media can't adapt?
- baurigae 12y agoAch, Lycos! From Lycos, to Facebook. The perspective is welcome, and reassuring. Fake, probably. But that's your washingtonpost.com Thanks!
- snarfy 12y agoI don't buy it. MSN.com? Really? It looks like IE users that never changed the default home page. That doesn't mean the website is popular.
- peter303 12y agoLots of sites have subcontracted Bing search and Bing maps. They would point back to MSN.
- thebosz 12y agoWay back in 1996, our ISP was named Teleport.
- muglug 12y agoWeird that they don't lump together IAC/InterActiveCorp's properties (inc. Ask, Answers & About)
- meritt 12y agoThis data is from comScore. Their data source is a panel of users with their toolbar installed. It's shit, to say the least.
- dbenhur 12y agoComScore data is collected from panels with self-selection bias, but also incorporating significant statistical correction based on random selection panels and demographic data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ComScore#Data_collection_and_reporting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ComScore#Data_collection_and_re...
- kacperp 12y agoThey also apply different methodologies from case to case. Some publishers include Comscore's tracking beacon, so their data will be based on a mix of panel and "real" tracking data whereas other data will only rely on the panel.