What are the most popular sites in the US?
The internet as we know it has yet to reach its 30s, but there have been seismic shifts in online traffic over the past year.
One measure of where web traffic is headed in the US is Alexa’s report on the top 10 visited sites. The Amazon-owned analytics company ranks sites using the combined metrics of daily number of visitors and monthly page views.
As a new year approaches, changes are also afoot online. A study of internet traffic patterns over the year using archived data from the Wayback Machine shows several key websites slugging it out for top dog.
Top 10 Sites in the US (Alexa/Wayback Machine)
Here is the list of top 10 ranked sites as of December 2016:
1.Google.com
2.Youtube.com
3.Facebook.com
4.Amazon.com
5.Yahoo.com
6.Wikipedia.org
7.Reddit.com
8.Twitter.com
9.Ebay.com
10.LinkedIn.com
With nearly 76 percent of the search engine market, Google.com unsurprisingly leads the rankings pulling in 165.56 million unique visitors. However, another site under Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. moved into second place within the past year.
The video-sharing site Youtube overtook Facebook for the runner-up spot pulling in more unique visitors and estimated visits than its social media rival. However, it still lags behind the social network in total number of page views. Facebook’s users in the US have been busy in 2016, racking up 1 billion more page views than YouTube’s users.
The most recent surprising development, not shown in the graph above, was Reddit’s triumph over Twitter in the rankings. Reddittors took to a thread to celebrate the site’s move to 7th place while making fun of ranked sites that have not been so fortunate.
Redditor xmromi: Yahoo is 5? Who are these people who still YahuuuuU! in 2016?
Redditor donthugmeimlurking: Great, now I can finally start saying that I was using reddit before it was cool.*immediately gets pelted by various objects.
At the bottom of the rankings, Ebay.com, Netflix and a couple upstarts are struggling for relevancy. Ebay.com suffered a fell to Reddit and Twitter over the fall and held on to 29 million unique visitors every month in November. Unfortunately, Netflix got kicked out of the top 10 club after being replaced by LinkedIn.
YouTube lags behind Facebook in this metric, but it makes up for it with more unique visitors (Alexa)
Redditors visit twice as many pages per visit compared to Facebook users. (Alexa)