The most popular web sites every year since 1996 | Hacker News Reader

The most popular web sites every year since 1996

washingtonpost.com

233 pointsbrandonhall102 comments

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?

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

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

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.

Okay that makes sense...I figured that since they were showcasing Glam.com and Brash.com on their homepage, that those sites were a major part of their business, but from those numbers it looks like they're a tiny fraction of their whole network's traffic. I'd be interested in seeing a list of all of their properties.

More companies we've never heard of and that nobody uses? Still sounds like money laundering

So, 3M uniques? Still doesn't make sense even with the roll-up.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

The article says that it's based on comScore, which groups all properties owned by one company under that company. So really "top web companies."

Still 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.

I 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.

Google Display Network Ad Planner rates Yahoo 3rd [1] (but does not count itself but does include YouTube so ...)

---- [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites

Agreed. It felt more like a Buzzfeed article to be honest. It's not really clear or scientific about it. Firstly it talks about 'top websites' implying individual website rankings worldwide, and then ends up casually showing US rankings with loads of website brands lumped into whatever parent company owned them, ending up with everyone wondering what the hell Glam Media (now Mode Media) is and why it's US only brands. Which is fine, it's just poorly written.

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

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

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

I would like to know how they formulate these metrics.

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

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.

So, the majority of internet users?

Yahoo is huge outside Western countries.

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...

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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

Probably 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.

I 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.

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

Really? Does that data get made available in market reports?

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

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...??

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

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

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

It's not google.com, facebook.com, and yahoo.com; it's Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. The companies have many different properties.

This comment will have to be repeated on this thread about 50x before people realize this.

But I guess you could blame ComScore or Washington Post for not making it obvious.

Fantasy football?

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

> "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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I 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.

It is there since Sun days, which wasn't raking anything. Also as a division, Java makes almost no revenue.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

> 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.

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.

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

Huffington Post

TechCrunch

Engadget

I must be seriously underestimating the pageviews of those websites then :)

AOL.com is still a top ~100 property in the US. Not sure why, maybe sponsored starting homepages, people checking old email accounts, etc.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Way back in 1996, our ISP was named Teleport.

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

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.

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?

ComScore's numbers reflect unique visitors and not visits.

Ach, Lycos! From Lycos, to Facebook.

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

Thanks!

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

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

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

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

Just shows how terrible comscore is at measuring.

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

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

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

Search is still #1.

agreed completely.

Fascinating.

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