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

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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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:

Rank Sites Share
1 www.google.com 6.70%
2 mail.yahoo.com 4.44%
3 www.facebook.com 4.26%
4 www.yahoo.com 3.36%
5 www.myspace.com 3.00%
6 mail.live.com 1.71%
7 www.youtube.com 1.42%
8 search.yahoo.com 1.41%
9 www.msn.com 1.36%
10 www.ebay.com 1.27%
11 www.gmail.com 0.93%
12 mail.aol.com 0.53%
13 images.google.com 0.51%
14 www.bing.com 0.51%
15 www.wikipedia.org 0.48%
16 www.aol.com 0.47%
17 my.yahoo.com 0.43%
18 www.amazon.com 0.39%
19 www.craigslist.org 0.38%
20 news.yahoo.com 0.34%
21 www.pogo.com 0.33%
22 www.ask.com 0.27%
23 finance.yahoo.com 0.25%
24 onlinebanking-nw.bankofamerica.com 0.24%
25 maps.google.com 0.24%
26 www.ebaymotors.com 0.24%
27 address.yahoo.com 0.22%
28 www.mapquest.com 0.21%
29 www.bankofamerica.com 0.21%
30 www.tagged.com 0.20%
31 www.plentyoffish.com 0.20%
32 www.paypal.com 0.17%
33 chaseonline.chase.com 0.17%
34 www.weather.com 0.16%
35 www.cnn.com 0.16%
36 www.walmart.com 0.15%
37 answers.yahoo.com 0.15%
38 www.msnbc.com 0.15%
39 online.wellsfargo.com 0.14%
40 search.msn.com 0.14%
41 www.chase.com 0.13%
42 www.singlesnet.com 0.13%
43 www.twitter.com 0.13%
44 edit.yahoo.com 0.13%
45 news.google.com 0.13%
46 www.espn.com 0.12%
47 games.yahoo.com 0.12%
48 www.wellsfargo.com 0.12%
49 www.netflix.com 0.11%
50 www.photobucket.com 0.11%

Source: Experian Hitwise

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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