Internet All Stars ‘01: Where are they now?
Written by Max Freiert (contact - e-mail) -- October 1st, 2007 | Recommend This“Bootylicious” was dominating the airwaves , Rush Hour 2 was battling American Pie 2 for box office (if not artistic) greatness and the US was more concerned about stem cells than homeland security. It was August in 2001, and just because the Internet bubble had already burst, the internet itself was still going strong. With a full six years of technological growth and consumer adoption, how has the internet changed?
A lot.
We’ve been tracking internet activity for a while. Long enough, in fact, to look back now and find some really cool stuff. The table below shows the largest 50 sites circa August 2001, based on monthly attention. More importantly, it also shows how that attention share has shifted since.
Biggest Losers
- AudioGalaxy.com:A filesharing site falls completely off the radar? Who’da thunk it?
- Flowgo.com: Kids have short attention spans. Despite being more colorful than radioactive skittles, Flowgo’s “cute” media could not compete with Myspace’s glitter templates
- Iwin.com: Downloadable games? Sure…but not when the same thing can be played in a browser, and for free.
- Netscape.com: You can’t spell AWOL without AOL.
- Sina.com: Apparently the biggest website in China lost presence in the US
- Geocities.com, angelfire.com, tripod.com: Precursors to social networks are still precursors. It was fun while it lasted.
- Altavista.com: Babblefish successfully got me a D in French Class. Pouvez-vous dire vos résultats de recherche êtes-vous mauvais aussi?
- Excite.com: Victim of the bust and an unremarkable portal, the site still looks stuck in 2002.
- Lycos.com: Another unremarkable portal, another huge loser.
- Dogpile.com: With a name that implies that they aggregate crap, it’s no surprise that this site fell to the wayside as search improved.
Biggest Winners
- Google.com: While every other search engine/portal/search aggregator declined (or even completely fell off the map) Google.com now captures 381% more consumer attention than it did in August 2001.
- Pogo.com: The online gaming site has grown from a respectable attention share of .34% in 2001, it now grabs nearly 1.69% of all time spent online.
- CNN.com: The news giant captures about 48% more of consumers online attention than it did in 2001.
- Mapquest.com: Despite GPS being in just about every device but the toaster, the map and directions provider has grown more than 32% in terms of attention since 2001.
General Trends
- Consolidation of Search: In 2001, people apparently had a really hard time finding stuff. In the top 25 sites, 10 were some form of search engine or portal. With the exception of the MSN, Yahoo and Google, the rest have fallen out of the picture.
- Shift toward socialization: The top sites in 2001 were predominately focused on delivering one-way information, whether it be through search, professional produced media, or ecommerce. In 2007, the top 50 are skewed heavily towards social sites, so much so, in fact, that MySpace, Youtube, and Facebook account for a collective 14% of all time spent online.
- Increasing entertainment: With broadband speed comes broadband media and games. Pogo.com, runescape.com, and neopets.com all live in the top 25 sites on the web.
It’s interesting to note that almost all of these sites capture less online attention than in 2001. While this (in some cases) is a function of waning interests, an overall decrease in attention devoted to the top 50 sites speaks to the diversity of the current internet as it compares to 2001. More sites mean more places to spend time, and a naturally wider distribution of attention. But this hasn’t stopped the web from evolving dramatically, and for some really great sites to grow like crazy and some really poor ones to die off completely.
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Posted under: Attention, Compete Ranked Lists, Popular Culture |
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Get the 
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:01 pm
How exactly do you define attention? Is it share of visits? Time spent?
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:25 pm
David - attention is the amount of time spent on a domain as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users for the month.
For example if US internet browsers spent a collective 1 Million hours browsing the internet in august, and Yahoo recieved 10000 of those hours, they would capture a 1% share of attention.
October 5th, 2007 at 2:13 am
The real sad thing about Geocities was that it had so much potential to be developed
It could have been the next myspace, the next blog network, the next facebook, the next twitter
If only the owners saw the potential and thought about the future
October 9th, 2007 at 10:40 am
Perhaps Ask.com (or AskJeeves, for those who remember) could’ve performed better, in a world where online search has so much importance.
Their current engine is a huge leap over what they had “back then” but unfortunately, it’s not as “deep” as the big three search leaders: Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
Maybe they should think about bringing back “Jeeves” ; )
October 9th, 2007 at 11:29 am
And how are you calculating ‘time spent’ on a website? This data is from a toolbar or something?
What is 1% of 2007 “attention” compared to 1% of 2001 “attention”? Aren’t there more users by now?
the % scale just seems like a weird way to present the statistics.
October 9th, 2007 at 11:50 am
So attention is a percentage measure of the total. But, total time online has growth so although some sites may look like they are loosing, chances are there traffic may still have risen in visitor terms.
October 9th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Very interesting stuff. I am still a little unclear about how the time on a website is calculated. Where do you obtain the data about my and others website activities? How do you deal with complications, such as when someone had 20 tabs open as they remain online with their DSL, as they go to the mall for 8 hours? Is that considered 8 hours for each of the 20 websites?
October 9th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
yes SkeptiSys , good point, ive always held that in mind. its way more complicated than simple analysis, but maybe there’s a metric for that too. like for example, i m online on gmail chat …on web browser, and that too nearly all my waking hours! thats a lot of time spent on gmail!
October 9th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
This is definitely an interesting table, thanks for the information. It’s interesting to see that most sites failed :)
October 10th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
I’m curious about the source of this data, where did it come from?
October 12th, 2007 at 5:40 am
Another guy with a calculator thinks he is a statitistician. There isn’t even any mention of what methods were used to come up with those figures, or what the anticipated accuracy is, or anything that might have escaped their net. This guy probably thinks his statistics are infallible.
Just dumb.
October 13th, 2007 at 1:42 pm
I’m with Bob. Where did these numbers come from? There is no mention of sources used to determine these percentage numbers or the methodology used to determine these “facts”. Interesting numbers but would NOT consider this as any type of structured and scientific data.
October 27th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
I would like to know how do you know how much time people spend on the sites, hows this done? thanks
October 29th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Compete blog tells how people behave online
The Compete blog is my new favorite blog. I’ve learned quite a lot on user behavior online after I discovered it a few days ago. Which big search engine is most efficient and why people fill in complete URLs into the search boxes instead of the …
November 6th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
@Rasul, @Bob,
Compete triangulates multiple data sources, including ISP, Panel and Toolbar to estimate U.S. web traffic. Learn more here: http://blog.compete.com/where-do-these-numbers-come-from/
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