At 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.

One of the best perks of working at Compete is the ability to analyze website traffic down to page level detail for any domain — measuring visitor conversion, discovering a website’s referral sources, and getting traffic figures for millions of sites without being restricted to analyzing five domains at a time through Site Analytics.

Today, we’re pleased to make available Compete Top Lists. This new product provides ranking lists for up to 500,000 domains on the basis of any metric available on Compete.com:

• Unique Visitors
• Total Visits
• Pageviews
• Time Spent On Site
• Monthly Attention

Whether you’re a site owner wondering where you fall in the context of your peers, a domain buyer looking for the next great undervalued site, a venture capitalist looking for the next big as-yet discovered hit, or a stat-head interested in analyzing the web on a macro level, Compete Top Lists offers a new level of insight into the ever changing web.

Interested? Contact membersupport@compete.com or follow the link below for more information.

Online personal sites are a lot like social networks; the most critical factor for a site’s success is people. More specifically, the volume and activity level of members needs to be high enough for users to make connections, and for visitors to be enticed to join. But despite the online personals market becoming increasingly crowded with newcomers, the top dogs of the industry seem to be as strong as ever.

The chart below compares total site traffic to total active members for the top US online personal sites. By comparing these two numbers, its possible to see how factors such as acquisition efforts, site design, and audience impact site usage.

• Mate1.com and True.com both do a terrific job of driving visitors to their sites, but this traffic simply doesn’t convert. Members represent 13% and 24% of total visitors (respectively).
• HotorNot.com members also make up a small share (21%) of total visitors, but this results from the fact that visitors can rate members (the main draw of the site) without being a member themselves.
• Plentyoffish.com, a service built on ad revenue is a great success for all involved. More visitors become members because the service is completely free, and the site generates an a great deal more money because members consume considerably more pages.
• Niche dating site BlackPeopleMeet.com also sees a large number of members as a share of total visitors (71%) due to a very targeted audience.

The next step in the love equation is member usage, and if repeat visitation is any indicator, consumers find a great deal of value in free (or at least open) services. The chart above shows overall member involvement (measured as the total number of times a member accessed each site). Since this metric is a function of both total members and member activity, it paints a more accurate picture of each site’s base.

• SinglesNet.com, ranked 4^th in terms of UVs, ranks first in total member visits at over 27 million in December. A fairly open platform and free trial membership helps encourage registrations and an average of 10.7 monthly visits per member.
• PlentyofFish.com, despite having around 1/5 as many visitors, nearly ties Yahoo Personals in terms of total visits. The entirely free service encourages users to communicate, and drives Plentyoffish members to visit the site an average of 14 times a month.
• While the represent major dating services in terms of total visitors, both True.com and Mate1.com look like they compete more with Niche site BlackPeopleMeet when compared on the basis of member visits. Aggressive acquisition and sales tactics (such as requiring a subscription for any type of user-to-user communication) are prime factors in their equally low repeat visitation (around 5 times per month per user)

With social networking providing much the same service as a dating site, its interesting that pure online personals sites continue to grow. But then again, “looking for anything I can get” doesn’t really mean anything on Facebook, but it will probably get you a full inbox on Mate1.

As we finish up our first full year of blogging at Compete, we thought we’d take a look back. Using the wealth of Compete data to find trends, the blog has made strides this year, in both Technorati ranking (up almost 10,000 spots to better than 2,300) and readership.

Here are some of the posts that have helped get us there, ranked by page views.

• 10. Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD: Does anyone care?
• 9. Netflix vs. Blockbuster: A heated debate between two extremists
• 8. Facebook now ranked 3rd in Page Views; MySpace down nearly 20%
• 7. Digg Overtakes Facebook; Both cross 20 million unique visitors
• 6. Xbox360 vs. Wii vs. PS3: Demand doesn’t lie
• 5. If Clicks Were Votes – Republican Candidates
• 4. Webkinz: The next Club Penguin?
• 3. Craigslist’s Dirty Little Secret
• 2. Top 20 Websites: Where DO we spend our time online?
• 1. Internet All Stars: Where are they now?

Thank you to all who have contributed and all who have read. Please use the comments section to let us know if there is anything you’d like to see us write about in 2008!!

Key Observations (Winners list):

• The Emergence of Content Sharing: 5 of the top 10 gainers having something to do with sharing content (YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg).
• Traffic to Facebook.com has increased by 14.6M, but hold on…traffic to MySpace.com has also increased by 10.2M during the same time period.
• AdultFriendFinder.com continues to thrive with nearly 24M unique visitors (up 8.8M this year), but look out AFF, Fling.com is catching up with you quickly. Fling has gained a whopping 17.4M visitors in the past 12 months to reach 18.7M unique visitors in September.
• Rebranding of Cingular to AT&T helped out ATT.com. All Cingular.com traffic is now channeled to wireless.att.com
• Digg has been growing faster than Facebook!

Key Observations (Losers list):

• Traffic declined to only 8 domains in the Top 50 (Sept ‘07).
• Two Amazon properties on the list - IMDB.com and Amazon.com
• Two Microsoft properties on the list - Passport.net and MSN.com. My guess is that most of their lost traffic went to Live.com, MSN’s new portal. Live.com is up 10.2M unique visitors during the same time period.

Many media buyers are often forced to secure ad inventory based on total impressions…which in turn gives web designers a terrific incentive to inject a website with as many unnecessary pages as visitors will swallow. MySpace has been frequently called out on its bloated structure just for this reason. Because of page view inflation, flash and the increasing use of AJAX, time based metrics provide a much clearer picture of visitor interaction with a site.

But comparing traditional page view-based traffic to time based traffic metrics yields an interesting analytic: page views per minute, calculated as the average number of pages served for each minute a visitor spends on a site. Page views per minute (PPM) is a function of two things: how fast visitors are consuming content and the inefficiency of a sites structure. So who are the worst PPM offenders? Surprise! MySpace isn’t one of them.

The chart below shows the top 20 sites in terms of Page views served per minute in September, along with each sites total number of visits.

Among the list of highest PPM sites, there is an interesting mix of domains that would naturally encourage users to refresh pages frequently, sites that (innocently) could probably be tightened up, and those that are simply trying to serve as many ad impressions as possible without driving visitors away.

Questionable Motives:

• Facebook.com – Facebook serves 3.4 pages per minute of active use. This could be a function of Facebook members digging into all the meaty content, but there’s also something funky going on. Looking at this metric over time, PPMs start to increase dramatically. Back in September 2006, Facebook was serving 2.5 pages per minute. The .9 PPM increase may not seem substantial, but when your site is generating nearly 14 billion page views, that’s nearly $4 million in incremental monthly ad revenue at a $1 CPM.

Impression factories:

• Smashawards.com – Smashawards was by far the worst offender on the list. Part of the Smashits network, this site serves 6 ads on every page. Additionally, it automatically refreshes itself after about a minute of inactivity, effectively forcing new page views, 6 new impressions. I would wager these ads don’t perform well.
• Southasianews.com - this news site has 6 different ad placements on their homepage. With that much content and a new page served every 10 seconds, some of those advertisers are getting ripped off.
• Mygirlyspace.com – While MySpace.com doesn’t make the list, at least two sites devoted to MySpace layouts do. This site actually serves an ad when you click through to another piece of content. Here’s a tip, don’t do this when someone clicks on a link looking to advertise with your site.
• Makeoversolutions.com – Part of the glam network, this site serves a new page every 17 seconds. A word to media buyers, other glam network sites just barely missed making the list.

Content buffets: Sites that should have high PPM

• Smugmug.com - Devoted entirely to photographs, this site allows subscribers to share photos on an ad-free platform. At the pace that people browse photos, (especially wedding photos, the biggest tag on the site) its appearance on this list is no surprise.
• Americansingles.com - While the high PPM at this online dating site may mean members aren’t finding the love they are looking for, it’s logical they would be checking out all their options, so a high PPM is not surprising.
• Davidsbridal.com – Wedding Gowns and Tuxedos? Lots of choices means a lot of (quick) decisions.
• Enterprise.com – Renting a car apparently means inputting a lot of information. Enterprise apparently took the approach of spacing this visitor information process over multiple pages.

This type of analysis is not something that can be applied universally, and it means nothing without considering a site’s design, purpose, and content. But it does help to expose sites that are clearly out to make money or hit traffic goals at the cost of visitor experience… and hopefully help move the needle away from non-performing banner ads.