The most popular web sites every year since 1996

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/12/15/from-lycos-to-ask-jeeves-to-facebook-tracking-the-20-most-popular-web-sites-every-year-since-1996/

by brandonhall • 12 years ago

233 102 12 years ago

washingtonpost.com

biomimic• 12 years ago

Search is still #1.

gpvos• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

That 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• 12 years ago

internet porn was centralized enough in 1996 to be only year that it made top 20??

josefresco2• 12 years ago

Possibly. 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

lpsz• 12 years ago

Surprised 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.

josefresco2• 12 years ago

The "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• 12 years ago

It 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-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.

pbhjpbhj• 12 years ago

Isn't Ask Toolbar a sneak install [read fraudulent misrepresentation] with Adobe [PDF] Viewer?

fmitchell0• 12 years ago

i'm confused. what/why is gannett (in 2013)?

justignore• 12 years ago

Gannett is a large media holding company. They own/license a number of news stations, but more importantly, own USA Today.

listic3• 12 years ago

Do they count visitors to their actual website? I think not.

angersock2• 12 years ago

I'm rather surprised--which is to say, calling bullshit--that no porn sites (any of the $TUBE network) shows up on this.

Dirlewanger• 12 years ago

Probably 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...

angersock2• 12 years ago

I wonder how you'd collect that...log every DNS lookup at the ISP level? Surely they already do this.

blumkvist• 12 years ago

You don't need the NSA to get that info. There are plenty of companies who aggregate data from ISPs.

technofire• 12 years ago

It seems you've overlooked "Penthouse" near the bottom of the list in 1996.

Gustomaximus• 12 years ago

It's likely they clean these sites out. I know a company doing a similar report did this. In reality 3 or 4 of the top 10 sites were porn.

Also I found interesting gay porn seemed to be very over represented on mobile internet, about 20%-ish of top porn sites. I found this interesting as in a male world you would expect this to be about 10% so it seemed either gay males watch much more porn or as I assumed, guys would have a look on their phones as this was more private to have a curiosity look...??

dpweb• 12 years ago

I remember first seeing a Yahoo TV commercial. Was like, Yahoo is big enough to have a TV commercial?!!

rancherito• 12 years ago

I remember thinking the same thing. Still impressive they're as high as they are today considering I haven't used it in years.

sp332• 12 years ago

Yahoo owns $34B of Ali Baba, which is doing crazy well right now and taking Yahoo up with it.

macNchz3• 12 years ago

Glam 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 and 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• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_Media

spullara• 12 years ago

I do hope they named themselves after the company in Ugly Betty on purpose.

macNchz3• 12 years ago

Not 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• 12 years ago

haha 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• 12 years ago

Palantir 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

bkmartin• 12 years ago

Me too. I was like, who the heck is that? And then I searched and found them... and I'm like... I don't think I've ever even heard of any of their properties before. Would love some insight into who is visiting their stuff...

flurpitude2• 12 years ago

Chlamydia. No wonder they rebranded as Mode Media. Still never heard of them though. Maybe they do bacterial marketing.

Thrymr• 12 years ago

From the article:

Remember, this is data from comScore... So other metrics may have other rankings.
We say that mostly because we have never heard of “Glam Media,” apparently the seventh biggest web network last year. Sure, why not?

htaunay• 12 years ago

They claim to have 406M unique visitors monthly. If that is the case, it isn't shocking to see them at #7, only surprising that a lot of people working and living with tech since forever never heard of them

dmix2• 12 years ago

I'm guessing ComScore combine metrics from visitors across various sub-properties.

Glam properties on Compete:

Glam.com = ~700k https://siteanalytics.compete.com/glam.com/

Ning.com = ~2 million https://siteanalytics.compete.com/ning.com/

Foodie.com = ~307k https://siteanalytics.compete.com/foodie.com/

etc

So these rankings are not based on singular properties. It probably combines Glams other properties such as Brash, Bliss, Foodie, Tend, etc. They have tons.

Which may be fair since Yahoo is a series of sub-properties, although the branding is more consistent than Glam.

dietcokeplus• 12 years ago

Bloggers use Glam Media as kind of an ad network. I'm guessing Glam Media counts those blogs/sites as part of their own.

IkmoIkmo2• 12 years ago

Heh, by that standard, Google should be on place 1, and be 10x ahead of number 2, considering half the web is running google ads.

habosa• 12 years ago

Funny. I had never heard of them either until my sister was offered an internship and I looked them up. Seems they have an enormous network of thousands of websites that, when added together, is bigger than Twitter in terms of page views. It's insane that I could spend so much time on the internet and know nothing about them. I guess it's just not targeted to me.

jbigelow76• 12 years ago

Glam Media's heyday was before Google started slamming content networks (thousands of pages of inter-networked and heavily SEO'd sites with little content and loads of ads) with their Panda algorithm update.

zhte415• 12 years ago

Tencent, Baidu? This seems to ignore obvious big players.

wcchandler• 12 years ago

Looks like they used comscore for the bulk of their sources -- which only looked at US traffic to "web properties."

listic3• 12 years 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.

listic3• 12 years ago

Though 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

wuliwong2• 12 years ago

Elephant #1 is that google.com is clearly #1 and facebook.com is #2. No way yahoo.com is above them in 2013.

afro88• 12 years ago

I'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• 12 years ago

On 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.

wuliwong2• 12 years ago

This 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.

Thaxll2• 12 years ago

Gmail is the most popular email service. http://www.techspot.com/news/50678-gmail-finally-overtakes-h...

bduerst• 12 years ago

I think that Android uses the Google Search API, not the actual website, but I could be mistaken.

oDot• 12 years ago

Here's a per domain comparison:

http://www.similarweb.com/global

For the click lazy:

1) Facebook.com

2) Google.com

3) Youtube.com

4) Yahoo.com

5) Live.com

ianremsen• 12 years ago

Yahoo is huge outside Western countries.

jpatokal• 12 years ago

Yahoo is huge in Japan, where it's an entirely separate company, but not really anywhere else. And it's catching up pretty fast in Japan as well (Yahoo 53%, Google 40% and growing).

http://returnonnow.com/internet-marketing-resources/2013-sea...

frogpelt• 12 years ago

Yeah, I don't understand this. Google owns YouTube also.

I would like to know how they formulate these metrics.

CSMastermind• 12 years ago

Right by it's not "Which Company Received the Most Web Traffic Across All Domains" it's "Most Popular Websites".

kevin_thibedeau• 12 years ago

The data is collected from people who think nothing of having intrusive, cycle sucking, third-party toolbars running in their browsers. Probably explains the continued presence of AOL too.

maxmcd• 12 years ago

So, the majority of internet users?

noblethrasher• 12 years ago

Now 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.

ozh2• 12 years ago

WTF is doing AOL in the top list nowadays? Genuine question.

organsnyder• 12 years ago

Huffington Post

Igglyboo• 12 years ago

TechCrunch

nickhalfasleep• 12 years ago

In some ways this is deceptive in a smartphone world, if you consider all the networked Apps that also vie for "connected" screen time.

sehr• 12 years ago

Do you mean using an in app browser? Those hits still count IIRC

lukejduncan• 12 years ago

App 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.

flurpitude2• 12 years ago

Yahoo the most popular, AOL 5th and Glam Media 7th in 2013? There's something fishy about these rankings.

valarauca1• 12 years ago

Yahoo 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• 12 years ago

Google 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?

mda• 12 years ago

Just shows how terrible comscore is at measuring.

yc1010• 12 years ago

Delighted 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• 12 years ago

As 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• 12 years ago

Craigslist 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• 12 years ago

agreed completely.

freshyill• 12 years ago

Fascinating.

briholt• 12 years ago

It'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• 12 years ago

When 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.

Thaxll2• 12 years ago

This 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

megaman22• 12 years ago

Bing is behind the german version of Google globally...

BobMarz• 12 years ago

CBS, 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• 12 years ago

Ach, Lycos! From Lycos, to Facebook.

The perspective is welcome, and reassuring. Fake, probably. But that's your washingtonpost.com

Thanks!

snarfy• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

Lots of sites have subcontracted Bing search and Bing maps. They would point back to MSN.

thebosz• 12 years ago

Way back in 1996, our ISP was named Teleport.

muglug• 12 years ago

Weird that they don't lump together IAC/InterActiveCorp's properties (inc. Ask, Answers & About)

meritt• 12 years ago

This data is from comScore. Their data source is a panel of users with their toolbar installed. It's shit, to say the least.

dbenhur• 12 years ago

ComScore 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_re...

kacperp• 12 years ago

They 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.

The most popular web sites every year since 1996

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