Google has just released it’s top 1000 websites list. It makes for some interesting reading, especially if you are curious to know which are the web’s most popular sites. It’s ranked by the number of unique visitors and the numbers are truly staggering. There are no prizes for guessing facebook is #1 with 540 million visitors. But this isn’t just about curiosity.
I think all webmasters and website owners should study this list. And as they check out the sites ask themselves why is this website so popular? Sometimes, like with social networking sites, the answer is obvious, but other sites could be more of a surprise. Who would have thought, that when Pete Cashmore started a simple blog called mashable to report on all things in the social media world, in a few short years it would be as big as PC World with 5.6 million visitors and #696 on the top 1000 list. And it’s rival blog techcrunch would be #850 with 4.7 million visitors.
It probably comes as no surprise the web’s biggest encyclopedia, wikipedia, is #4 with 310 million visitors, or that blogger, now owned by google, is #7 with 230 million visitors. Blogger has a large chunk of the 112 million blogs known by technorati. But what might surprise you is there are around 72 million chinese blogs. And at #8 is baidu and #9 is qq, which are both chinese websites. Are the chinese going to dominate the internet in the future?
WordPress is #13 with 120 million visitors. This is a reflection on the popularity of blogging. And bing, microsoft’s increasing popular search engine is catching google fast. Twitter is a social networking phenomenon, growing almost at the speed of light and is now #18 with 96 million visitors. And our thirst for auctions means ebay is #24 with 74 million visitors, but of more importance to us, it’s the web’s biggest marketplace for selling anything.
It’ll be interesting to see how the top 1000 changes over time.
