The Top Time-Suckers On The Web

January 26, 2007

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The pageview’s not dead, just weaker. There will be certain types of sites where those numbers matter – especially textual sites. But increasingly, as video and interactivity thrive, it is time spent per user rather than pages viewed that gets the attention of marketers. This is more of a TV model than a billboard one.

Jay Meattle at Compete.com’s blog, asks, “where DO we spend all our time online? Which websites are more successful in capturing our attention compared to others?”

According to Compete’s metrics, the top 20 domains attract almost 40 percent of the average websurfer’s time, led, by a mile, by MySpace.com. MySpace users hog up News Corp. bandwidth so much that they take up 12 percent of the total time spent anywhere on the Web. Users spent almost 28 billion minutes at MySpace in December.

Yahoo! and its properties capture 8.5 percent of our time, followed by MSN and eBay with 3.7 percent, Google with 2.1 percent, and AOL with 1.7 percent.

Google’s time allocation may seem surprising low to some. But Google is primarily the road to the event, not the event itself (though it could become an event, if the company would betray the Google purists and be the portal the rest of us know it’s dying to become). Even if you add YouTube, which sits at number 12th on the list, Google’s time share raises to only to 2.7 percent.

Meattle writes:

Yahoo holds a significant lead over Google+YouTube.com, MSN+Live.com and AOL+AIM.com. Yahoo simply needs to merge with MSN to take #1 (hint hint)
Yes, many have suggested, especially on Wall Street, that Microsoft get in bed with Yahoo to better compete with Google in search while simultaneously overtaking MySpace in time spent. Both companies have been unwilling to talk about it in public.

Also interesting on that top 20 domain list is the presence of two online gaming sites, Pogo.com and NeoPets.com. Market analysts have recently predicted that online gaming sites would be the next great advertising target, growing 70 percent year-over-year for the foreseeable future. Together, Pogo and NeoPets capture two percent of all time spent online, slightly lower than Google’s share.

The Top Ten Websites Ranked by Total Time Spent