The Five Most-visited Websites

Thanks to the data-crunching power of sites like compete.com and Alexa, we’re able to size up the real traffic count of various domains on the web. Keeping a radar on these stats is important — not only in recognizing current opportunities, but also future trends. The top sites, as reported by Alexa.com, are as follows:

1. Google: There’s no doubting the dominant position Google has staked. Despite a less-than-expected performance in its paid advertising division this year, Wall Street’s reaction to Google was a bit over-cautious. The Internet giant still dominates search, and revenue is still up, despite the shaky economy.
2. Yahoo!: Surprisingly the oft-reported-as-beleaguered search engine stands second behind Google in the U.S. traffic share. Yahoo also apparently has better search ad conversion.
3. MySpace: In my humble opinion, Rupert Murdoch snatched a sweet deal for MySpace in 2005 when he bought it for $580 million.
4. YouTube: Google bought this video sharing site in October, 2006 for $1.65 billion. Of course, this may have even been a better deal than Murdoch’s MySpace purchase.
5. Facebook: It’s growing faster than MySpace and still has managed to escape a corporate buyout or public offering.

What do these sites say about marketing to the new media generation. It comes down to the two S’s: Search and Social Media. In the coming years, I expect social media to play just as large — if not a larger role — than search, and marketers should expect sites that are similar to the latter three of the above list to play a larger role in the coming years than the former two.

Social Media Marketing image by Jeff Milner [cc, 2.0]