Where the Internet Crowds Are Going
Seeking Alpha trawls Alexa data for trends that sharp investors can use. However sharp they are, are they leading or lagging indicators of share of mind?
Where the Internet Crowds Are Going
From Seeking Alpha
By categorizing each of the top 100 websites by type (e.g., Google (GOOG) is for search, Yahoo! (YHOO) is a portal, Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY) are commerce-oriented, etc.) and ranking each by its growth in "reach" (defined as percentage of all Internet users who use the particular website, based on data from Alexa) over the past two years (November 2004 through November 2006), we can see what types of websites are growing in popularity and which are not. Here's the result, showing how fast various categories have extended their reach (fastest growing categories higher up on list), with representative examples of the fastest growing websites in each category:
1. Media Sharing: youtube.com, flickr.com
2. Search: google.com, baidu.com, google.com.br, live.com
3. Blog: blogger.com
4. Utility: megaupload.com, rapidshare.de
5. Social Networking: myspace.com, orkut.com
6. Informational: wikipedia.org, digg.com
7. Software: sourceforge.net
8. Portal: qq.com, yahoo.com.cn
9. Commerce: craigslist.com
