As a data-loving nerd, I can't stop playing with quantcast.com, a website introduced to me by fellow Online staffer, Queen Amidala. It bills itself as "the world's first open internet ratings service" and serves up some vital and fascinating metrics about websites at the push of a button or click of a link. You can pull up approximations of unique monthly visitors plus the site's overall ranking in the top 20 million sites (or so) on the entire web.

Doubtlessly useful in setting goals and seeing performance of similar sites, I end up using it more as a guage of how popular my own interests are. It's funny -- I assume everyone surfs the same sites I do. I'm not sure why, but it's probably true of every internet user. When you mention your favorite website to someone in casual conversation, you tend to assume the person you're talking to has already gone there. Quantcast's numbers put such assumptions into perspective.

It also reset a number of expectations I had regarding this site's popularity. I had assumed sites like fark.com and theonion.com got much more traffic than we did. Heck, I had assumed disney.com got much more traffic, but that's not the case. And it help put any concern or consternation about fan site competitiveness into check. A quick search shows that supershadow.com (#105,543) really isn't anything to lose sleep over. Stephen Colbert's constant plugging of colbertnation.com doesn't seem to lift its traffic beyond a core group of fans (it comes in at #56,872).

And for the life of me, I still can't figure out why aintitcoolnews.com is so supposedly influential in Hollywood, given how low its traffic is (430,309th most popular site?) [EDIT: Thanks to Stooge for pointing out that the shorter URL aintitcool.com ranks at a much more impressive 17,263rd, which is still pretty darn low to be an influencer, if you ask me.]

Anyway, here's a ranking of the 30 sites I tend to go to the most, ranked by their overall popularity on the web (and not by how popular they are to me).

1st - yahoo.com (114M)
2nd - google.com (109M)
6th - wikipedia.org (46M)
16th - youtube.com (26M)
38th - bankofamerica.com (13M)
42nd - cnn.com (13M)
45th - imdb.com (12M)
66th - craigslist.org (66M)
658th - livejournal.com (1.9M)
1,485th - comedycentral.com (1M)
1,576th - gmail.com (966K)
3,058th - scifi.com (556K)
4,016th - starwars.com (442K)
4,374th - theonion.com (408K)
5,459th - huffingtonpost.com (334K)
5,945th - wikia.com (312K)
7,231st - boingboing.net (262K)
7.348th -- boxofficemojo.com (257K)
8,841st - lucasarts.com (215K)
16,731st - fark.com (115K)
18,738th -- theforce.net (102K)
23,405th - newsweek.com (80K)
28,093rd - somethingawful.com (66K)
56,164th - rebelscum.com (30K)
56,872nd - colbertnation.com (29K)
72,005th - tfw2005.com (22K)
72,436th - indianajones.com (22K)
91,608th - yojoe.com (17K)
93,886th - tformers.com (16K)
191,734th - trekmovie.com (7K)
294,219th - yakface.com (4K)

Where do our online partners stack up?

404th - scholastic.com (2.7M)
1,157th -- hasbro.com (1.2M)
1,504th - randomhouse.com (998K)
1,824th -- lego.com (857K)
31,555th - darkhorse.com (58K)
32,840th -- sideshowtoy.com (56K)
65,072nd - chroniclebooks.com (65K)
81,433rd - masterreplicas.com (19K)
211,458th - officialpix.com (6K)
254,583rd -- gentlegiantltd.com (5K)

Anyway, have fun obsessively typing in websites to see where the rank in the big picture. It's all public data, ready to be consumed.

ph