Yahoo vs. MSN and Google

Yahoo, MSN and Google are sites #1, #2 and #3, respectively in the Alexa Traffic Rankings. (Link to Top 500.) For as long as we have been tracking traffic on the Web Yahoo.com has been in the number 1 position and continues to this day to get an impressive daily reach of 30% of the Internet audience. (Link to traffic comparison graph.)

But is Yahoo's position at #1 secure? MSN, with the boost given to it by Internet Explorer, which defaults to msn.com as the home page, is close behind Yahoo.com with a daily reach of 28% of the Internet audience and growing.

Bringing up the #3 slot is Google with daily reach of 22% and growing fast. If Google's current trajectory holds up it should be neck and neck with Yahoo.com within a year.

But that's not the whole story. Comparing yahoo.com with google.com masks a lot of hidden details and only tells you how one Internet portal compares with another. What a lot of people really want to know is how Yahoo's search traffic compares with Google. For that we are going to need to look at Alexa's traffic details for yahoo.com. In the section labeled "where do people go on yahoo.com" you will see that search.yahoo.com accounts for only 9% of Yahoo's traffic. In other words, Yahoo's venerated position at #1 has very little to do with its search traffic. In fact, if you were to break out Yahoo's search traffic from Yahoo as a whole you would find that it has a daily reach of less than 3% of the Internet audience. MSN is in a similar situation with search.msn.com garnering only 7% of MSN's total traffic.

So, when comparing Yahoo MSN and Google the truth is that Google, not Yahoo, is tops in the search game by a wide margin.

When It Rains, It Pours

...it is true of Hurricanes and the sites that track them. When the hurricanes come so does the traffic. Take a quick look at this traffic graph for noaa.gov showing the Reach per Million over the last two years: Link.

Every summer, along with the hurricanes, come the Web surfers looking for information about the hurricanes. According to the graph, noaa.gov has an average Reach per Million of 2000, or about .2% of Web users visiting the site. But in the summer the NOAA peaks at 8,000 -- almost 1% of all Web surfers visiting. Now that's a flood of traffic (sorry for the pun.)

Top 500 Sites Have All the Luck

Every two months Alexa's crawlers go out and scour the web bringing down 100 Terabytes of Web content and over 4 billion URLs into the archive. In the process we discover over 18 million unique sites on the Web. These are e-commerce sites, blogs, news sites and more. Virtually anything you can imagine is on the web spread out among these 18 million sites.

But how much traffic do these sites get? It depends on your Alexa Traffic Rank. Let's break it down by Alexa's Rankings, starting with the Top 500. Out of a total of 18 million sites to choose from, the Top 500 represent less than .003% of sites. But, as you would expect, these sites get a disproportionate amount of traffic. In fact they get 45% of all traffic. No, that's not a misprint. The odds that any Web surfer in the world is on a Top 500 site at any give time is about 50/50.

Moving down the rankings, if you take Alexa's Top 100,000 sites you'll find that almost 3 out every 4 clicks are spoken for. In other words, almost 75% of all the traffic on the web goes to the sites in the Top 100K list, leaving the remaining 18 million or so sites to fight over the scraps.

Like the distribution of wealth on the planet, the distribution of traffic on the Web is extremely lopsided. The Top 500 are champagne and caviar. Sites 501 - 100,000 are meat and potatoes. The rest are hungry.

Deep Impact

Nasa.gov jumped into Alexa's Movers and Shakers, with a 3X increase in daily visitors, after successfully colliding an impactor with comet Tempel 1 on July 4th. Nasa.gov