Sink or Swim? The Top Moving Sites Of 2007
Written by Max Freiert (contact - e-mail) -- January 17th, 2008 | Recommend ThisAt Compete we frequently write about monthly traffic volume and site popularity, but the focus is usually on the ten or twenty sites that enjoy monthly visitors in the tens (or even hundreds) of millions. While it’s important to investigate these sites, massively popular domains like Google or Yahoo typically don’t change much in terms of domain-level traffic or rank. Right behind these behemoths, however, a large number of websites battle for the finite resource of consumer attention and the shifting dynamics of this group will ultimately define the future of the web.
With 2008 now more than two weeks old, it’s a great time to look back at last year and see how the web has changed. What sites experienced a surge of traffic in 2007? Has anyone fallen off the map? We compared the top 1000 sites in December 2007 with those in December of the previous year to find out.
The chart above shows the top twenty sites that gained or lost the most amount of traffic from December 2006 to December 2007, as a percentage of visits in December 2006. A few interesting trends are revealed:
- The web has yet to reach its “Social Peak”: Among the fastest growing sites, eighteen of the twenty offer a prominent peer-to-peer communication platform. Even in the adult video category, sites that function almost identically to YouTube (redtube.com and youporn.com) represent the fastest growing niche.
- Online daters would much rather be subjected to ads than a checkout form: Two of the fastest growing sites (Iamfreetonight.com and datehookup.com with 31000% and 3050% growth respectively) are relatively new entrants to an already crowded online personals market. Both services succeed by offering free membership and generating revenue through advertising, a business model they share with only a handful of other services.
- New Social Networks still have a chance…as long as they find their niche: CaféMom appeals to a very specific group, and has captured a substantial audience (and grown over 2000% in one year) despite the constant buzz surrounding Facebook last year.
- People place a high value on peer opinion: Both Stumbleupon and Reddit both grew by over 500% in 2007. Digg.com (not listed) also grew by nearly 300% in terms of visits in 2007.
Compete’s Top Site Lists are the best way to get visibility into the web as a whole. Compete offers ranked lists of 1,000 to 500,000 domains with complete Visitor, Pageview, Time, and Attention metrics.
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January 17th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
It is interesting that Techcrunch is the only site in the Technorati top 100 popular sites
to be on the fastest moving list
Do you have access to the Top 100 movers? What other blogs were there?
What is interesting about Netscape is its decline since it became a social site - you would not have expected such an adverse reaction to its change
January 17th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Is there a feature on your site that allows you to run this analysis on other domains, verticals or markets? We’d specifically be interested in the Q&A market, eg:
Yahoo Answers
Askville
Live QnA
WikiAnswers
Yedda
FunAdvice
Blurtit
etc.
Of course we’re interested because we run one of the sites in this category, and macro level insights are extremely expensive & hard to come by (eg, beyond our market research budget). Any advice you have in this area appreciated in terms of products you have to deal with this. We already use your search analytics products, and they are very good.
January 17th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Movin’ On Up: Fastest Climbing Social Sites Of 2007
Compete has just released a list of the top moving sites of 2007, which includes the social platforms sites:
cafemom.com
linkedin.com
reddit.com
stumbleupon.com
squidoo.com
webkinz.com
sixapart.com
wordpress.com
Are there any surprises in this list?…
January 17th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Odd that sites like Facebook and others did not show or grow?
January 17th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
I don’t get one thing. Is this list limited to sites of a certain profile (other than the annual percentage gain)?
I’m asking because I see Simpy gained about 550% between 12/2006 and 12/2007 (see http://siteanalytics.compete.com/www.simpy.com/ ), yet it’s not on the top 20 list in your post.
How come?
Thanks.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Actually, make that a bit over 760% yearly increase of visitors for simpy.com - see http://siteanalytics.compete.com/simpy.com/?metric=uv
So are some sites not listed, even if they percentage-wise growth is high? Is your list limited to sites with > N monthly visitors? If so, what’s that N?
Thanks.
January 17th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
I too am wondering how come retailmenot.com was excluded from the list:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/retailmenot.com/?metric=uv
???
January 18th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Searchengineweb - We do have access to that list…sounds like a future blog post to me!
Jeremy - If you have a list of sites that you are interested in and don’t mind spending some time inputing domains, you can actually run this analysis yourself at siteanalytics.compete.com. Below every chart, we show month-over-month, and year-over-year change for each domain. The only thing you couldn’t see is sub-domain data. Send me an email if I misunderstood the question, or if your interested in a small custom analysis.
Sam - One function of growth is relative size. It’s very easy for a small site to grow rapidly, while a large site could add 10,000,000 visitors and not have a large impact on its overall membership. Facebook actually attracted more incremental visits than any of the sites on this list over the period, but only grew by 90% in terms of total visits because of its large established base in 2006.
Otis - For some reason I missed mentioning this in the post. For this analysis, we only looked at sites that were in the top 1000 sites (ranked by visits) in 2007 or 2006. This was done to eliminate noise from the lists. It is extremely impressive to grow visits by 1000%, but when that growth is from 1,000 to 10,000, it is dwarfed by a site that grew from 100,000 to 1,000,000. If we had used a cut off of the top 10 or 20,000 sites, none of the sites above would make the list (with the possible exception of the top 3).
Guy - See above. Retail me not was VERY close to making the top 1000 sites (ranked by visits). Had we used UV’s instead of Visits as a cutoff metric, Retaimenot would have been in this list.
January 18th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Max: ah, yes, of course! Sorry, forgot that for a moment. Thanks for clarification.
January 18th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Netscape’s social networking started re-directing to propeller.com sometime last year. I haven’t typed netscape.com on my browser for months now. Does the negative change for netscape take that into account?
January 20th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
WordPress On The Up: But Why?
The guys over at Compete has just released a list of the fastest moving websites of 2007, listing WordPress.com with a 523% growth in 2007 and approximately 25 million visits. Now in my opinion, those are incredible stats, that none of us would mind ha…
January 21st, 2008 at 2:15 am
Veoh, Wordpress.com and LinkedIn see huge growth
What’s interesting is Veoh is on that list, but YouTube isn’t. And it’s a pretty big list. Why are people switching to Veoh? I hadn’t heard about it till a couple of months back (I saw it because someone would upload Heroes epis…
February 6th, 2008 at 8:16 am
dude - I’m not even kidding - not only have I been a daily user for quite some time, but if youporn has an IPO - i’m totally there.
February 8th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Interesting list. I would not have expected such a drop off in netscape since they moved to propeller - but wow thats a huge dip.
February 12th, 2008 at 3:34 am
It is really no surprise Wordpress is on it’s way up. It’s a great blogging enhine and most blogging website run on it. You can find so many freely available themes and plugins for it, it’s open sourceness makes it’s the kind of Blogging.
- Dwayne Charrington.
http://www.dwaynecharrington.com
February 21st, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Thanks for telling those * sites ;) hehe anyways I really felt bad for bolt donno why but I am feeling bad whatever happened to them.
March 12th, 2008 at 11:16 am
What I find interesting is that a dot gov site, weather.gov, grew 461% on an already fairly large number of hits. Seems like the American public is getting a pretty good deal for their tax dollars.
March 17th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Yea YouPorn.com rulez :)
March 22nd, 2008 at 10:14 am
The reason of wich the traffic volume for adults video share sites like http://www.yoyovid.com is ever-growing is simply… these sites are the new frontier of porn, in little words:” Why pay for porn when you get porn for free?”
That’s all folks!
April 29th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
interesting post. i’ve never compared anything about my site but maybe i should. i’m just to lazy.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:27 am
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