Top US Internet Properties for September 2003

• Oct. 21, 2003

In addition to announcing the top US internet properties for September 2003, comScore MediaMetrix also announced that the total number of US internet users surpassed the 150 million mark for the first time ever. In addition, the total time spent on the average internet user grew by 3% in September even thought the month of September is 1 day shorter than August.

Total time on the internet is further broken down by where people accessed the web (from home, work or university) as outlined in the following chart:

	Aug-03 (In millions)	Sep-03 (In millions)	% Change
Total Internet	236,728	244,121	3.12%
Home	142,631	140,337	-1.61%
Work	79,604	83,713	5.16%
University	14,494	20,071	38.48%

In addition, the top 50 properties (based on number of unique visitors are as follows:

Rank	Property	Unique Visitors (000)		Rank	Property	Unique Visitors (000)
1	MSN-Microsoft Sites	110,167		26	EA Online	16,196
2	AOL Time Warner Network - Proprietary & WWW	109,335		27	Expedia Travel	16,076
3	Yahoo! Sites	108,096		28	AT&T Properties	16,054
4	Ebay	62,557		29	Sony Online	15,754
5	Google Sites	56,270		30	Weatherbug.com Property	15,453
6	Terra Lycos	51,605		31	Vivendi-Universal Sites	15,387
7	About/Primedia	43,656		32	iVillage.com: The Womens Network	14,158
8	Amazon Sites	36,295		33	Shopping.com Sites	13,919
9	Gator Network	34,158		34	NFL Internet Group	13,914
10	Excite Network	32,750		35	Gannett Sites	12,775
11	Verisign Sites	30,787		36	United Online, Inc	12,683
12	Viacom Online	25,846		37	Cox Enterprises Inc.	11,865
13	Walt Disney Internet Group (WDIG)	25,037		38	Wal-Mart	11,580
14	CNET Networks	24,593		39	AmericanGreetings Property	11,507
15	Symantec	24,459		40	Adobe Sites	11,493
16	Weather Channel, The	23,577		41	News Corp. Online	11,481
17	Real.com Network	22,934		42	Travelocity	11,414
18	Verizon Communications Corporation	19,424		43	Earthlink	11,360
19	Overture	18,786		44	ORBITZ.COM	11,333
20	InfoSpace Network	18,725		45	Dell	11,302
21	eUniverse Network	17,767		46	Comcast Corporation	10,647
22	Classmates.com Sites	17,673		47	New York Times Digital	10,627
23	SBC Communications	16,955		48	Hewlett Packard	10,389
24	Monster Property	16,720		49	EMODE.COM	10,166
25	Ask Jeeves	16,501		50	Columbia House Sites	10,004

If you look at the top 5 you will see that 4 of the 5 are search engines. As we've been talking about for the past few months, you MUST target your search marketing efforts as MSN, Yahoo! and Google. I won't mention AOL because they get results from Google. Therefore if you position well in Google (either through SEO or AdWords) you will, by default, position well in AOL.

Keep in mind that the ratio of these numbers hasn't changed much over the past year or so. The top 4 or 5 sites have been in the top 5 for some time. But, if you start looking at the other sites, you will start to see some trends.

For example, CNET, who is number 14 on the list, gets sponsored results from Google AdWords. Therefore an ad in AdWords not only covers you in Google and AOL, you also get coverage in other sites, such as CNET.

Overture, while #14 on the list, actually has much more influence. Its results appear in sites like MSN (1), Yahoo! (3), Lycos (part of the Terra Lycos network) (6) and Gator (9) to name just a few.

You will also see that sites likeVerisign are quite high. This is because they recently introduced a page redirect called SiteFinder where if a user typed in a URL wrong, they would get redirected to Verisign's custom page. This caused a 540% spike in their overall traffic.

As a web marketer you have to keep in mind the whole market. Sure focusing on Google, Yahoo! and MSN will drive about 90% of your traffic, but you must also consider where the other 10% are coming from. You must also consider the quality of those leads. Perhaps the 3% of your traffic that you get from AskJeeves actually converts at a higher rate. Then you may want to invest more in your AskJeeves advertising to see if the conversion rate holds true even when visitors increase. You may find huge traffic comes from MSN but it isn't converting at the rate you'd like. It could be due to a poorly written Overture ad, or it could be the way the page was indexed by Inktomi which is causing the problem.

In any case these results show that as web marketing becomes more diverse, you need to ensure you can cover as many bases as possible within your budget. While Overture and Google AdWords have the potential to drive the most traffic to your site, are they the best performing forms of online marketing?

Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning
specialists