Compete’s Top 20 Domains – Really?
Compete has compiled a list of the top 20 domains over the last year, up until October. There are a few surprises on the list, most notably geocities.com, which I thought was long dead; target.com and adobe.com which I never thought of as major attractions on the web, with almost as many uniques as youtube; and mapquest.com – don’t we all know google maps is the best?
Interestingly, as Read/Write Web has pointed out, the Alexa rankings are somewhat different from this. The Alexa list features a number of Web 2.0 sites (flickr.com, blogger.com, facebook), but also seems somewhat skewed, with sites such as comcast.com and imdb.com ranked prominently.
Overall, I think both lists are not very dependable. Compete is still a pretty young company, so their metrics might be a bit off. Alexa is skewed towards the demographics that has its toolbar installed – and that tends to be a more technical audience.