The most popular 10,000 websites analyzed - 8 Questions & Answers

Last week I had the urge to do some real quantitative data analysis. After several days of programming data collection scripts, I compiled a huge database of data. If you want to see the source of my results check the raw outcomes on this page. In this post I’ll answer the most interesting frequently asked questions about the web (NSFNN* alert):

Is porn dominating the web?

From the 10,000 most popular websites, 10% is marked as adult oriented. Sounds like a lot, but the total reach of these sites are a mere 5%. So the answer is no, the web isn’t all 18+

Interesting is the fact that The Netherlands (population 16M) is 3rd in owning adult websites. As they say: where a small country, can be big. The USA is of course number one and China doesn’t even appear in the list although they own 10% of the websites.

Is China taking over the web?

Luckily the answer is short: No. The USA owns 44% of all websites, but China is coming second with 9%. That is less than the number of European websites with 16%. But in reach Europe loses from China with respectively 7% against 9%. Conclusion is that Chinese language courses aren’t necessary yet.

Hola, 你好, Konnichi-wa – excuse me, what language?

Although one might argue that my data is off (more people understand Chinese and Spanish than English ). A majority (55%) of the websites are English. Chinese takes second place, and third is Spanish. Arabic is also well represented with 3,3%. All the other languages don’t take a significant part of the web. Sorry French people.

Are all websites made in Silicon Valley?

This is actually more or less true. From all US states California (37% reach) has a significant advantage over any other state, it actually owns 7% off all the identified websites in the top 10,000. Second comes New York in number of websites but Washington has a higher reach (22%).

I was already link building my Geocities.com account!

Maybe link popularity wasn’t a hype in the early days of the web. But the data does show that geocities.com deserves that pagerank of 10/10 because it has over eight times more incoming links than google.com (2nd). So link building might not be very hip and trendy as you would expect.

Does anybody know what it is? Update: The most linked list continues with the usual suspects like Adobe, Amazon, Microsoft, Wikipedia and Apple. I don’t know why, but third - with 260,000 incoming links - is some Chinese website ( http://miibeian.gov.cn ).Update: explained

Is it true that Yahoo and MSN are more used than Google?

The statistics are ambiguous on this. But going from my data Google actually has the biggest reach (9%) if you add all 72 local domains together. In number of views Google loses from Yahoo! that has 12% (!) of the total views. (Damn you, Yahoo! Games)

About MSN: I personally only happen to land there if I mistype a domain, or check my spam (hotmail) but they still seem to take 4% of the total reach-pie.

Has the web evolved to web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is hard to measure (Maybe because it doesn’t exist). But I’ve tried by location RSS feeds and stylesheets. And the results are actually quite surprising. 10% of all the homepages provide an RSS feed (If people actually use these RSS feed is of course a different analysis).

And 58% use stylesheets on their homepage for layout.