Humans are predictable creatures, but it’s interesting nonetheless to see seasonal trends depicting where everybody’s going online. January 2007, according comScore, was for taxes, job-hunting, and vacation planning, among a couple of trendy surprises. But the most significant change in traffic was to Wikipedia, which entered the top ten domains for the first time.
Also, as somebody-anybody sentiments rise, visits to potential presidential candidate websites also spiked in January.
“As we’ve witnessed on an annual basis, consumers turned to the Web at the beginning of the year in a very utilitarian fashion, with an eye toward planning,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix.
Visits to tax sites tripled as soon as W-2’s started making their way to employee mailboxes, led by IRS.gov with 13.3 million visitors, a 205 percent increase versus December.
Possibly all those early tax filers are looking forward to a hefty return in order to pay for a summer vacation. Hotel and resort sites received nearly a 30 percent jump, led by Walt Disney properties with six million visitors. Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Expedia, were the next largest traffic draws, attracting 5.2 million, 11.8 million, and 25.4 million visitors respectively.
The rest, perhaps, are looking for a new job with more vacation time. Visits to job sites spiked 31 percent overall, with CareerBuilder, Monster, Yahoo HotJobs leading the way.
They also need new jobs for those houses their looking to buy. January visits to real estate sites jumped by 28 percent compared to December. The most popular real estate sites were Move Network, Yahoo Real Estate, and Homegain.com.
And as soon as the mid-term elections were over, folks started looking ahead to 2008. Online Barack Obama isn’t quite the prophet he is on TV, and is quite far behind Hillary Clinton in terms of website visits. Barack attracted only 297,000 visitors to his site, 16,000 fewer than Hillary. They’re both pretty far ahead of John Edwards though, who drew just 202,000 visitors.
There were actually two new additions to the top 10 properties list: Wikipedia and New York Times Digital. Here’s the whole list:
1. Yahoo Sites: 129.1 million visitors
2. Time Warner Network: 117.2 million
3. Microsoft Sites: 114.9 million
4. Google Sites: 113.4 million
5. eBay: 80.6 million
6. Fox Interactive Media: 74.8 million
7. Amazon Sties: 50.8 million
8. Ask Network: 49.1 million
9. Wikipedia Sites: 42.8 million
10. New York Times Digital: 40.1 million
Add to 
Bookmark Murdok:
