Star Wars: Blogs | Fragments from the Mind's Eye

Fragments from the Mind's Eye

date posted: Mar 08, 2007 8:17 AM | updated: Mar 08, 2007 9:17 AM

Number Crunching Websites

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

http://blogs.starwars.com/pablog/115

Click here to hide comments for this entry

	slow Slow's Rebel Ramblings
date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 8:38 AM Oh yes. I will be spending much time here. Thank you so much for the link. Just one more thing to interfere with work.

The Stooge
Star Wars Joke-A-Day

date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 8:43 AM

Cool site! The trick, though, is that it seems to measure popularity by domain name, and not by the actual site. So if a site has a bunch of different domain names, its overall popularity is bound to suffer.

This might explain your Aint It Cool question... aintitcoolnews.com gets a lot less viewers than aintitcool.com ('cause why type an extra four letters?). Similarly, wikia.com isn't as popular as wikipedia.com... which itself is much less visited than wikipedia.org.

	nob01 Oil Bath Bubbles
date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 9:17 AM Interesting to note that the greatest number of users fall into the 35-44 age range for StarWars.com - that'll be what I like to call the Star Wars generation - those of us who were around 10 years old when Star Wars was released in '77 It shows that we're still clinging to our youth, eh?

	Pabawan Fragments from the Mind's Eye
date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 9:19 AM You're absolutely right Stooge. I've amended the aintitcool example accordingly (though that number is still low, in my books). Yeah, if you do a search for starwarskids.com, it pulls up a ridiculously low number... yet the kids section is the third most popular of starwars.com, something that isn't reflected in the way quantcast slices up their data. ph

	Dark Spork Sporktastic Voyage
date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 9:25 AM The site I work for... Wow. Go mainstream media, go! I'm also kind of surprised how high Livejournal is... Not that I should. Club Jade is a mere 3,334,248, however.

	eddie Obsessive Fanboy Eddie and his Timeline Chronicles
date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 10:17 AM Great site!!!! My site is 2,389,457th!!! (sounds depressing, doesn't it?)

Son of a Bith
The Cantina Corner

date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 11:27 AM

Let's talk politics for a sec, shall we?

We got Huffington Post, The Onion, Newsweek, Steven Colbert, and CNN on the list. But where is Fox News.com?

I am not trying to rock the boat, I am just curious as to how Fox News is the most popular news channel on TV (even those critical of the channel say so), but on the Web, the more liberal sites are higher in the numbers game. No NBC either. You would have thought that with Keith Olbermann's rise in popularity as the "Anti-O'Reilly" would have made him Net popular.

	Pabawan Fragments from the Mind's Eye
date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 11:35 AM Foxnews is quite popular. It's #349 with 2.9M visitors. It's just not on my list of regularly visited sites. ph

The Stooge
Star Wars Joke-A-Day

date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 1:00 PM

still pretty darn low to be an influencer

Don't ya think AICN's influence is overrated? I can't recall any real effect they've had on a major studio release, nor any minor picture which they've managed to turn into a hit. Sure, they get plenty of press, but it's almost always negative ("old media" complaints about the morality of publishing rumors and reviewing shooting scripts, etc.). And studios quickly figured out that they can avoid negative AICN reports just by flying one of their editors to the movie set.

I honestly like AICN -- it's a good resource for genre fans, and can be a lot of fun. But Hollywood wised up, and it's not making the kind of waves it used to.

	Dark Spork Sporktastic Voyage
date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 5:03 PM AICN's glory days are behind them - I bet their main readerbase are mostly other movie/tv bloggers. Even I only read it if I hear about a scoop secondhand.

	patacki
date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 5:33 PM Interesting... I use Compete.com for free web metrics. Compete is considered the most accurate service for US based metrics, but I notice Quantcast offers intl stats for some sites. The numbers look suspect, but I'll start testing this service. Here is the Compete link if you're interested. http://snapshot.compete.com/starwars.com+

	Wampa_Jedi Jedi Wampa's Playhouse
date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 6:28 PM I'm stunned beyond words to find that my own piddly website, RedGallows.com, is even ON the freakin' site, let alone ranked in the 7-digit class (3,570,170). I supposed driving traffic to my custom toys may be helping, but still...... Thanks for giving me something new to obsess over, Pabawan...

	JMMC
date Posted: Mar 08, 2007 8:47 PM Oh, great. Now I'll be playing with this all day! My site -- myuselessknowledge.com -- is at 400,144. Not too bad, I'll say. By the way, Pablo, not only does the site have my Star Wars and G.I. Joe pages, but also the SWFA. Why don't I see it on that list?

Nar Cranor
Holochronicles: Continuity Hugs for Everyone!

date Posted: Mar 09, 2007 12:13 AM

Well, out of vanity, I had to check my own site, www.fandomcomics.com (which did not pop up, but it came up as www.swnsu.com, also the same site) and we are in 3,367,415th place. Which is pretty horrible. However, when you consider its out of 20,000,000 sites online, I suppose that isnt such a bad place to be. Thats in the top 16% of sites. Then again, I only do about 2000 visitors a month.

jkthunder
Seven Pieces

date Posted: Mar 09, 2007 10:22 AM

Responding to Nar Cranor^ and others about not finding results for certain sites... I'm wondering if the case is that the quantcast site is only ranking the *top* 20 million sites - and not that there are 20 million sites on the WWW. I'm sure there are many more than 20 million sites gracing the web, and the total fluctuates second by millisecond.

Interesting that yahoo.com beats Google. I think that probably has to do with yahoo mail, and other yahoo services beating out what Google has to offer with gmail and it's other adjuncts.

	marybrainchild SidiousSith's Holocron
date Posted: Mar 09, 2007 4:54 PM Sweet!!! I love number crunching thingies!! Strange the TF.N beats Rebelscum.. wouldn't have figured that one. This will certainly be an interesting weekend.. trying every single site I know that comes to mind.. Ha... I'll be busy. (20,000,000 sites online- How do they keep track of that MANY!?!)

	eddie Obsessive Fanboy Eddie and his Timeline Chronicles
date Posted: Mar 10, 2007 10:40 PM Great site!!!! My site is 2,389,457th!!! (sounds depressing, doesn't it?) Hey, after quantifying my website, I currently hold the 981,459th place!!!

	Ani Skylover SC
date Posted: Mar 11, 2007 9:07 AM sithclan.net (rank 531,948) not that bad for a french site ^^

	The Professor The Professor's Star Wars Blog
date Posted: Mar 12, 2007 12:08 AM Yah! Pabawan reads YakFace!

	Master Ki-Aaron-Mundi I was a Teenage Jedi
date Posted: Mar 12, 2007 1:26 PM Interesting that they don't have data for those under 18--I wonder what percent of StarWars.com's viewership would fall in that category?

	zach starwalker
date Posted: Mar 12, 2007 5:21 PM have any of you also noticed starwars.com is steadily dropping in visitors every month. maybe when the tv shows start coming out it will come back up.

	dustin@rebelscum.com Star Wars is Forever!
date Posted: Mar 13, 2007 11:29 AM Woohoo! R2D2Central.com ranks # 4,535,319! LOL! Not as many R2 fans as I figured hmmm Cool to see Pablo like to visit two of the sites I work on, TheForce.net & Rebelscum.com. Oh yeah, I like that Starwars.com thing you've got goin' on there PB, good stuff

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