2001 Year In Review

by Richard Zwicky

This article from The Mender (Issue 18),
Metamend’s Web Site Optimization and Marketing Newsletter.

Well, we’re at the end of another year, and I thought it may be a good time for a bit of end-of-year data.

According to Jupiter Matrix, for the period ending October, 2001, these were the most heavily visited web sites:

MSN-Microsoft Sites
AOL Time Warner Network
Yahoo!
X10.COM
LYCOS SITES

I looked at this data, and the first thing I did was throw out X10.com – Their ads appear as pop-up windows everywhere I go on the net, which leads to data skewing when counting how many people visited the site. I count a visitor as someone who actually looks at the content of the site, not sees and closes a pop-up window.

In fact if you go through the data at length you will discover that the search engines, by popularity based on usage, are now ordered as follows:

Yahoo
MSN
AOL
Lycos
Google
Netscape Search
Excite
Ask Jeeves
iWon
NBCi
Overture (GoTo)
LookSmart

Of course, ones like DMOZ and Northern Light appear nowhere, and yet their data is heavily mined by the above engines for their results. Interestingly Google, which ranks 5th, also powers much of Yahoo!’s search results.

Whenever I look at web stats around the size or popularity of the internet, I am reminded of one important bit of information. I referred to this information recently while attending a Trade Mission that included the Prime Minister of Canada.

I mentioned that when he was elected Prime Minister (1993) there were less than a dozen addresses on the internet which ended in .com. When Bill Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993 there were 8 .com’s. The most recent stats I have seen show that there are currently 23,105,903 .com’s; 6,700 edu’s; 1,251 .gov’s; 4,344,275 .net’s; and 2,835,439 .org’s.

By the time you read this hundreds of new one will exist. This means there are now over 30 million domains, not including international domains, such as .ca, .uk, .de, etc…, nor subdomans (www.yoursite.myhosting.com), tilde sites, and all the other variations.

When you add it all up, it’s estimated there are more pages on the net today than people on the planet! The point of the reference to 8 1/2 years ago was simple. Even those of us that are living the industry are rushing to keep up.

At this time of the year, when most of us are rushing around thinking about Christmas; about getting a few well needed days off, about a party, about what to get someone, or about how to make budget, also take time to reflect and plan out the new year.

As always, a long term strategy is what will make your web site, and business successful. At the speed of which technology changes, short term adjustments are constantly necessary, these include looking for new tools to improve your overall performance, and efficiency.

As we close this year I would like to take the time and thank all of you, who have participated with us this past year. Some of you are clients, some are business partners, some are alliance partners and some are subscribers. Each one of you have added something to the mix and helped us improve our service and our solution. Again this month we are announcing some new and important relationships. Through these types of alliances we are building a strong business and a strong community. Today our community is the world.

While reflecting on next year’s plans, I’ll be looking for ways to make these relationships and partnerships stronger still. We look forward to dealing with every one of you for years to come.

Other articles from this issue:
– Are You An Online Santa?
– Search and Re-Space