Jan 2008: Top Online Properties

February 29th, 2008 | by Brad King |

I’m looking at comScore’s Top 50 properties for Jan 2008. I’d link directly to them, but it’s impossible because it’s a Flash pop-up. However, I’ll give you the rundown:

  1. Yahoo: 184 million uniques
  2. Google: 134 million uniques
  3. Microsoft: 119 million uniques
  4. AOL: 109 million uniques
  5. Fox Inter 83 million uniques
  6. eBay 78 million uniques
  7. Amazon 59 million uniques
  8. Wikipedia 55 million uniques
  9. Time War 52 million uniques
  10. Ask 52 million uniques

There are 5 newspaper chains represented:

  1. NY Times(11) 48 million uniques
  2. Gannett(33) 23 million uniques
  3. Scripps(37) 21 million uniques
  4. Cox(48) 17 million uniques
  5. Hearst(50) 16 million uniques

I’m actually a bit surprised the number is that high, but it’s still not good news. Here’s why: Those top four sites have the ability to grown with acquisitions and mergers. They can grow their reach without too much trouble. Hell, if Microsoft buys Yahoo, the top property will have more than 300 million uniques (assuming all of those are unique, uniques).

The M&A route is the one that Media Metrix found was the reason behind most growth on the Web last year. The big leaps that companies made were from acquisitions or mergers. So you ask yourself: what are newspapers going to buy? Sure, there are calendar deals and partnerships with cars.com and such. Those are incremental. Maybe financial services, since that is the number one genre property.

Then we look at eBay and Amazon, which sell products. These sites will continue to draw big crowds because people but stuff.

Wiki is a read/write environment that allows social communities to form around content creation. Hmmm. The Wikipedia environment is larger than any newspaper chain in the country.

Despite asking users to create all the content. It’s almost like active communities can form around niche areas of interest…

Even Ask is bigger than every newspaper chain in the county. I’m not a huge fan of the site, but clearly, if they build it, they will come.

I don’t want to go all nuclear on newspaper, because clearly there are four positioned in pretty good shape. The point is this: companies that are in positions to acquire, sell goods or build communities all top the charts.

It’s maybe worth looking at, not that numbers are much to go on.

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