America's 10 largest websites
The 10 most-visited websites in America may share a few characteristics,
but interestingly enough, none are in the same business, with the
exception of two portals. Each has a different business model as well.
An analysis of these largest sites shows that no single model has helped
one type of Internet property or another to dominate the web in terms
of traffic. The collection of media that is the Internet shows how
essential web diversity has become to Americans’ lives.
With
each year, the Internet becomes increasingly crowded with websites of
various sizes, features and functions. The most-visited sites have been
among the largest ones for several years. That tells a great deal about
the real interests of Americans, probably as much as any other set of
markers.
24/7 Wall St. used data from Quantcast to rank the sites.
The rank is based on the number of people in the United States who
visit each site in a month. The data are updated daily. Revenue figures
are based on SEC filings for the public companies and for those in the
process of going public. For others, the information is based on data
from third party analysts. Revenue data or estimates are for full year
2011.
10. Microsoft.com
- Monthly audience: 61,981,128
- Year founded: 1975
- Revenue size: $69.9 billion
Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT)
website traffic does not include visits to content sites it controls
such as the MSN portal, MSNBC news site or the Bing search engine. The
visitors counted are for the online corporate destination of the world’s
largest software company. Microsoft’s site primary purposes are to
sell, download and support its most widely used software products --
Windows and its business suite of tools. Microsoft.com is also the
destination for public company information, including financial data and
the company’s significant patent and intellectual property legal
activity.
9. WordPress.com
- Monthly audience: 63,933,088
- Year founded: 2003
- Revenue size: $10 million
WordPress
has two large online destination sites. One is WordPress.org, a place
where millions of bloggers download basic open source software they can
use to create and maintain their own websites. The WordPress.org traffic
is not included in WordPress.com’s traffic figure. WordPress.com is the
destination for a broad spectrum of users -- from small bloggers to
large companies -- that use the site to post information and design
their blogs. WordPress.com is operated by Automattic, which sells custom
design, custom domains and upgrades to the basic WordPress open source
software. While the WordPress for-profit business has products used by a
large number of different media and large companies, Automattic does
not charge high enough fees to make the “upgrade” business a large one.
8. Wikipedia.org
- Year founded: 2001
- Monthly audience: 77,354,504
- Revenue: $20 million
Wikipedia
is operated by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. The work of the
foundation is to support a collection of open source encyclopedias. This
already includes dozens of encyclopedias written in the world’s most
common languages. The number of articles created for the sites is huge.
The English version alone has 3.9 million articles. The German language
edition has 1.4 million articles. The tiny budget of the foundation is
being used to drive global traffic to the level of one billion readers
and the number of articles to 50 million. All of the capital for these
projects is donated to the nonprofit foundation. Wikipedia is most
famous for making information on a universe of subjects available for
free to anyone with access to the Internet. But with such a large amount
of content and small staff to monitor its quality, Wikipedia is also
infamous for being inconsistent with mixed quality in different
subjects.
7. MSN
- Monthly audience: 78,095,128
- Year founded: 1995
- Revenue: $2.5 billion
MSN.com
is one of the three largest Internet content portals, along with Yahoo!
and Aol (NYSE: AOL). Its business is supported by display advertising
and search revenue. The portal model is based on providing millions of
visitors access to a large range of content. This includes a number of
areas that used to be exclusively the role of national magazines,
newspapers, radio and television. News posted by the portals is among
their most visited content, and so is content about sports,
entertainment and self-help. The portals have expanded into areas that
can get some local advertising revenue, particularly automobiles and
real estate. Premium news and entertainment content have recently become
a large part of the offerings of these sites as well.
6. Twitter
- Monthly audience: 90,790,080
- Year founded: 2006
- Revenue: $140 million
Twitter
is described alternatively as a “microblog” and as a “social network.”
Users, which by many estimates exceed 300 million, can post messages of
up to 140 characters at a time. This is microblogging to the extent that
the “tweets” are available for large numbers of people to read. It is a
social network to the extent that it allows users to exchange details
about their lives, plans and interests. The problem Twitter faces is
that it has not been able to turn what some industry experts believe is
200 million tweets a day into a viable business. Advertisers have shown a
reluctance to put marketing messages into these tweets because they are
so short and because Twitter users have often rejected using a service
that has become partially commercialized. Some of the Twitter users with
the largest followings, mostly celebrities connected to millions of
fans, use these followings as a way to promote causes, products or even
their own careers. So far, this has proved a more successful way to
exploit the service than traditional advertising.
5. Yahoo!
- Monthly audience: 94,840,280
- Year founded: 1995
- Revenue: $5 billion
Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO)
has been at the center of a number of controversies over the past
several years. It rejected a rich bid by Microsoft in 2008, had three
CEOs in four years, and executed a large series of layoffs. Recently, a
substantial portion of its board of directors resigned. Yet, the
remarkable size of the website’s traffic has not changed, and the parent
company continues to be profitable, despite a lack of revenue growth.
Some of the sites on this list would welcome Yahoo!’s profits. The
Internet portal makes money from a combination of display and search
advertising. Yahoo! runs far behind Google in terms of search engine
traffic, and it holds only 14 percent of the U.S. market for search
activity, according to Comscore. But it still manages to capitalize on
that small share.
4. Amazon.com
- Monthly audience: 99,374,352
- Year founded: 1994
- Revenue: $48 billion
Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN)
is the primary website for the world’s largest e-commerce company. It
is an online superstore with an immensely diverse virtual inventory. It
sells nearly anything brick-and-mortar retailers such as Walmart (NYSE: WMT), Best Buy (NYSE: BBY), Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), Home Depot (NYSE: HD) and Kroger (NYSE: KR)
sell. And that is to list just a few. Amazon has used the traffic and
customer base it has established over the years to enter a number of
new, lucrative and even revolutionary businesses. This includes
electronic books, which barely existed five years ago. It includes the
e-reader business, which Amazon pioneered with the 2007 introduction of
the Kindle. And it includes the online video-on-demand business. Amazon
has recently been transformed from a company that competes with other
retailers to one that also competes with the likes of Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) in the content delivery business and with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) in the consumer electronics sector.
3. Facebook
- Monthly audience: 149,488,208
- Year founded: 2004
- Revenue: $3.7 billion
Facebook,
the world’s largest social network with nearly one billion members,
plans to raise enough money through an IPO this year to value the
company at nearly $100 billion. The site is not even 10 years old. The
meteoric rise of the business is largely due to how it altered people’s
use the Internet. Before Facebook, Internet use was mostly passive.
Visitors went to a portal to get information, to a search engine to get
research results, and to video sites to watch content. Facebook helped
the Internet evolve into a two-way interpersonal medium on which people
voluntarily offer a great deal of their personal information to interact
with friends, family and business associates. In the process, Facebook
has been at the core of one of the most revolutionary changes in human
interaction. Despite this, Facebook has not been able to find a way to
make a great deal of money from its huge membership, particularly when
compared to Google and Amazon.
2. YouTube
- Monthly audience: 159,975,920
- Year founded: 2005
- Revenue: $1.6 billion
YouTube
is the largest video site in the world. To give an idea of its
dominance of the U.S. market, 18.6 billion videos were viewed at this
division of Google in January against the a total of 40 billion
nationwide for all websites. The average number of minutes per viewer
for Google’s video content, almost all of it on YouTube, was 448 minutes
in January, compared to 57 minutes on Yahoo! and 22 minutes on
Facebook. YouTube’s sales are only 5 percent of Google’s total revenue,
an extremely small amount given its size. To a great extent, this is
because most of the content posted at the site continues to be
low-quality, user-created videos, and these videos do not create an
environment attractive to major marketers. YouTube has found other ways
to pursue revenue. Premium content owners have started to use YouTube to
build audiences, and they often pay YouTube for traffic. YouTube also
has set up a paid video rental business and joint ventures with several
studios. Despite all of this, its revenue was only $1.6 billion in 2011,
as based on several estimates. YouTube is the only site on this list
that could not have existed before the advent of the broadband
technology that allows the transfer of large amounts of data online.
1. Google
- Monthly audience: 185,167,472
- Year founded: 1998
- Revenue: $37.5 billion
Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)
is the largest search engine in the U.S. Its dominance goes beyond
that. It is also the largest search engine by market share throughout
most of Europe. The only large markets where it has stiff competition
happen to be emerging markets with huge populations such as China, India
and Russia. Google has two substantial challenges now that will
determine whether its business can continue to expand at the
extraordinary rate of the past decade. First, there is a great deal of
competition to become the primary search engine on new tablet PCs like
the Apple iPad and smartphones like the iPhone. As more Americans turn
to these portable devices to use the Internet, it is not certain that
Google will be able to hold the dominant position it currently has
against Microsoft and Yahoo! The second challenge Google faces is
expanding its other offerings beyond search. It is unclear whether it
can use its Google.com site as a means to help it successfully market
these products, including applications that compete with Microsoft’s
Windows products or e-commerce products like Google Wallet. Google has
yet to demonstrate that it is more than a single legged company -- at
least so far as sales are concerned.
