I’m trying to find a list of the top 30 or so most visited websites. (The equivalent of the NY Times bestseller list for books, or the box office ratings that come out every week for movies).
Does anyone know where I can find a reasonbly current such list?
The only places I’ve tracked down have far far more information than I need, and want to sell me a yearly subscription for my business’s marketing efforts, or something. Not that I blame them, but I don’t need lots of data, or 10,000 ranked websites, just a simple ordered list of the top 25 or 30.
Thoughts?
thanks
There is no definitive guide because the web is a free-for-all.
There are plenty of web sites offering rankings, but each site has its own criteria for ranking.
I Googled top 100 web sites and got quite a few sites. Of those I saw on the first page, PC Magazine’s Top 100 (October 2002) is at least complied by a reputable site.
Of course, their criteria may not be your criteria.
Thanks, but sadly, that is not the answer I’m looking for… that’s just 100 sites that the editors of PC Magazine like. I specifically need something that objectively counts number of visits, although precisely how it counts them (unique sessions vs unique users vs time online or what have you) is irrelevant to me.
And nothing else I got from googling “top 100 web sites” was any better, unless I’m just dumb
There are third-party sites which keep track of hits for sites, but those sites must subscribe to the service. Even so, the information you seek is private to the individual site owners.
For example, the only way you will find how many hits microsoft.com receives is if they disclose that information. Don’t bet on it. They may offer some ball-park figure for PR purposes but they will not open their books to you, or anyone else. The same goes for any other site which deems such information confidential.
While you won’t be able to get a definite answer for the reasons already mentioned, the most visited sites are obviously pretty well known and you should be able to find reasonable estimates.
Nielsen//NetRatings publish some research findings you might find interesting. I don’t know much about their research methods but their top 25 list based on US audience measurements looks about right to me.
While you won’t be able to get a definite answer for the reasons already mentioned, the most visited sites are obviously pretty well known and you should be able to find reasonable estimates.
Nielsen//NetRatings publish some research findings you might find interesting. I don’t know much about their research methods but their top 25 list based on US audience measurements looks about right to me.
The CyberAtlas at internet.com has a stats page with links to synopsis of research findings from many different internet traffic research organizations.
Global or national results by individual website fell out of fashion some years ago. Early on the rankings companies used to have those figures but then they decided that ranking by aggregated “media property” made more sense for their main customer-base which is advertisers.
So all the results for all individual sites within the AOL TW universe (AOL itself, CNN, Warner Bros movie sites, Winamp, ICQ, etc.) get combined.
The individual numbers per site still have to be collected of course so the rankings companies have them but you may not be able to get them without paying.
BTW, another of the ranking companies is NetValue originally a French startup and still with particular expertise in the European market but also a worldwide offering.
Alexa only runs in the regular version of MSIE under Windows and for those users who have chosen to enable it.
The teeming hordes of AOL users are thus very unlikely to use it at all (if it even works at all across the AOL network).
And Alexa’s geographical coverage is very uneven. Korean sites seem to be regularly making the top of the Alexa list these days (right now 8 of the top 20 sites are Korean). I know that Internet and broadband penetration is relatively high in South Korea but the only way to explain the heavy slant towards Korean sites is that for some reason a large percentage of Korean users use the Alexa toolbar. Perhaps some major Korean ISPs turns it on by default?
However, Alexa can be a useful tool to compare relative traffic rankings between sites that have no chance of ever making the top-n on other traffic ranking reports. You can use Alexa to look at the website rankings for Joe’s Tire Shop compared to Jack’s Tire’n’Oil and the relative numbers will give you a rough idea of which one is winning the hearts and minds of web surfers.
