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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
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...??
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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."
