What do Internet users read on the network?

Source: Washington Post

While the growth of all the top websites is slowing down, blogs, virtual social networks and local information sites grow at rocket speeds.

The huge and rapid success of these types of websites has been quantified and concretized by the latest research work of ComScore Media Metrix, after it analyzed and monitored the top 50 websites throughout. last year.

The top growth sites are Blogger.com, a site that provides personal blogs, MySpace.com - a virtual social network where young people gather, chat, share their interests, Wikipedia - a word Giant online encyclopedia and Citysearch, a network of local information for every city in the United States.

The number of monthly visitors to each site increased with tremendous speed: From 185% (Citysearch) to 528% (Blogger.com), from February 2005 to February 2006. This growth far exceeds the average of 4% of the entire Internet in the US in general.

Obviously the Internet is still a fertile space, where new names like MySpace can emerge unexpectedly or old brands like Citysearch can still be reborn after years of languishing. Even established companies such as Google can benefit from buying or copying "services" that small, less-known brands pioneer.

New trend

For example, Google acquired Blogger.com in 2003, causing the number of readers or posting at this site to skyrocket to 15.6 million (from 2.5 million a year ago).

Another trend is also worth noting that sites that help users find local information are becoming increasingly popular. In addition to Citysearch, which provides local commercial and entertainment information, there are two catalog sites of this type that reached the top 50 last month, including WhitePages.com and Verizon's Superpages.com. According to analysts, advertising revenue on these sites will reach 6.1 billion USD in the next 5 years.

After many years of lagging behind the national gold rivals, local information websites are becoming powerful. Firstly, they themselves are better, and more importantly, users have begun to realize the benefits of these sites. They have all the information they want, needed for everyday life.

In the block of Internet giants, Yahoo maintains the largest number of people, although their growth rate is only about 5%. Google is the only giant to break this growth rule, as its user base increased to 21% last year. Google has not only grown steadily in the strong market, but it has also attracted many new users by invading other services such as email, maps and blogs.

At the other end, despite efforts to improve the service, the number of users visiting AOL and MSN hardly increased.

Thien Y