Top 20 Most Popular Websites

Alexa -- The Web Information Company tracks globally web surfer activity and comes up with daily statistics on most popular websites. As you can imagine this means dollars and cents in the global marketplace. And this puts into perspective the competition between Google, Yahoo. and Microsoft for dominance. Also it allows us to see where social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Craigslist are going.

Alexa is an Amazon.com owned company and, yes, it tracks companies like Amazon, Ebay and their reach across the globe. Besides what sites are being surfed, Alexa also breaks down average number minutes on each site, and who is using the site by age group, education, gender, income and location. These demographic breakdowns are essential in the competitive marketplace.

So what are the top 20 sites for United States websurfers? They are Google, followed by Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube(a Google company), MySpace, Windows Live, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Ebay, Microsoft Network, Blogger (a Google company), AOL, Amazon, Twitter, GO, Bing (Microsoft's new search engine), CNN, Flickr (a Yahoo company), WordPress (like Blogger, a free Blog service), and ESPN Sportzone. LinkedIn appears as number 24, Weather.com 25, and New York Times 28.

Google gets 34% of marketshre globally, Yahoo 26 %, Facebook 25%, and YouTube 24% and MySpace 4.5% and Twitter gets nearly 4%. Individuals spend more time on Facebook, an average of 27.5 minutes compared to Google's 7 minutes and YouTube's 22.5 minutes. Twitter users spend average of 8 minutes a day twittering. Bing, the new Microsoft search engine, is already in the top 20 at number 16 but amount of time spent is only 2.1 minutes. Nevertheless Bing can be seen as up and coming and Microsoft and Yahoo will be using Bing as their search engines, thus providing real competition for Google.

Now statistics such as these are not great for reading, but they do provide the nuts and bolts backdrop to news about Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and web trends. Notably, social media sites are heavily represented in these statistics. People are spending much of their time on these social sites, making friends, sharing photos and information, and exchanging and sharing files. News sites are not represented among the top twenty but they are represented in the top 50 and include the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal. Amazon and Ebay make strong showings in the top 20 at 13 and 9 respectively. Internationally Google China is number 4 in China and Google Japan is dominant there. So these companies have taken an international position and are heavily represented there. Baidu, a Chinese search engine is number 1 there and because of this carries 6% world share of surfers.

Are these fleeting trends? Hard to believe but the World Wide Web is only 15 years old. Skeptics then said that money could not be made on the Internet. Today the World Wide Web is a vast economic engine. Amazon is turning profits. Microsoft and Yahoo and have been around for more than 10 years; Google celebrated its 10 anniversary this year. Colleges, Universities, the United States Postal Service and all government agencies are on the web. Any business will need, if it does not already have one, a presence on the web. In a short 15 years the World Wide Web has become a part of our daily discourse and activity. Today there is still skepticism about profitabilty but no question that the world wide web is here to stay. Ignoring its possibilities would be ignoring vast opportunity.

Alexa is a useful marketing and analytical tool in gauging the reach and progress of these critical websites and their positions in the global marketplace.

5 MINUTES!!

With the price of everyday expenses, food, gas, housing, fluctuating wildly, it becomes increasingly important to keep your finger on the pulse, to keep up with news that affects your business, your business plan, your life and your customer's lives. How to do this? How much time to allocate to keeping informed? These are important questions you're asking as you organize your day.

It's possible to keep up-to-date allocating 5 minutes a day, first thing every morning. How is this possible? Let's take Yahoo Finance as an example. Yahoo Finance gathers daily headlines and stories from major business and finance news providers. This is a free service. Providers include a wide range from Business Week, Wall Street Journal's Marketwatch, the New York Times, Financial Times, Inc and Entrepreneur magazines, the Associated Press and Reuters, Forbes, SmartMoney, Fortune, Morningstar, CNBC, CNN Money, USA Today, US News and World Report, TheStreet.com and the Motley Fool. Click on the headline of your choice and read the article. You can print and/or email the article. The Wall Street Journal and Barrons are included as a headline only service. You must be a paid subscriber to read their full articles.

How is Yahoo able to provide so much information on a timely, sometimes up to the minute, basis? This is done through an internet tool called RSS or "really simple syndication". It's a tool that allows instantaneous distribution of feeds to your desktop. Yahoo, through My Yahoo, allows you to pull together your own interests and feeds onto your own My Yahoo web page. This is a free service. You just need to register with Yahoo to use it. Or you can use the Yahoo Finance page to access these daily providers of business and finance news. Or, better yet, you can bookmark our blog and access your daily news through our Yahoo Business and Finance link.

By using a site like Yahoo Finance you can be up-to-date in 5 minutes and plan the rest of your day accordingly. Of course, you may find yourself spending more time than you want. The resource is there when you want it. As an aside not all the Yahoo providers may be up-to-date. The Economist and Entrepreneur feeds were outdated. All others were current. But, as a first stop resource for business and financial news from a wide range of sources, Yahoo Finance is an excellent starting place. Check it out!!