Top 50 Websites Dominated By Search And E-Mail (GOOG)(YHOO)(MSFT)(AOL)

The Top Fifty websites based on their percent of US online visits from January to November 2009 are dominated by search and e-mail. The top dozen sites according to data from Hitwise include the Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) Mail, MSN (NASDAQ:MSFT) Mail, Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) and AOL (NYSE:AOL) Mail, in that order. Search destinations Google, Yahoo!, search Yahoo!, and Bing are among the top fourteen sites. Facebook is the No.3 site with 4.26% of US visitors and MySpace is No.5 with 3%. YouTube holds the No.7 spot with 1.42% of US visits.

There are a surprising number of commercial bank destinations among the Top Fifty sites. These include five different URLs that cover three banks–Bank of America (NYSE:BAC), Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC), and JP Morgan (NYSE:JPM).

There are very few e-commerce site on the list–Ebay (NASDAQ:EBAY) at No.10, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) at No.18, PayPal at No.32, and Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) at No. 36. The data shows what an uphill climb the internet is for most large retailers.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Top 50 URLs is how little they have changed in the last five years. Except for social networks the names are about the same: AOL, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Ebay, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Craigslist.

This is the complete Hitwise list of the Top 50 Websites from January through November this year based on their share of the US online visits:

Source: Experian Hitwise

Douglas A. McIntyre