Of the top 100 sites on the Web, which ones grew the fastest in 2008? In a report it is preparing to release tomorrow, The comScore 2008 Digital Year In Review (which you can sign up for here), comScore ranks the 20 fastest-growing Web properties. These are out of the largest 100 sites overall. They are shown in the chart above, as measured by growth in unique visitors. (Interestingly, in a separate list of the ten largest sites, only eBay showed a decline from 2007).
Most of the big gains among the fastest growers came because acquisitions (CBS acquiring Cnet, Everyday Health acquiring Revolution Health, JPMorgan Chase acquiring Washington Mutual) or traffic and business partnerships (Break Media, Glam Media, and Everyday Health with Drugstore.com). [Correction: Because of a mistake in our draft copy of comScore's report, we originally characterized Drugstore.com as having been acquired by Everyday Health. Drugstore.com is simply part of Everyday Health's ad network, and thus counts towards its total audience size, but is a separate entity].
If you strip out all of those, which denoted by asterisks, you get the sites that grew organically, including Infospace, Wordpress, Weatherbug, Answers.com Sites, Facebook, Hearst Digital Media, and Mozilla.
During 2008, comScore estimates that 4.5 trillion display ads were served in the U.S. alone. That comes out to more than 2,000 Internet ads per month per person. And, believe it or not, the number of ads served up actually declined a little during the year as publishers tried to push up CPMs (the amount they can charge per thousand ad impressions) by reducing inventory.
Above are the top ten publishers of display advertising as of November, 2008, along with how many billions of ad impressions each one served up in that month. Only two of the fastest-growing sites also made the list of top ten publishers of display advertising: Facebook (No. 4) and Glam Media (No. 9).
Now if we could only get the average CPM per site, then we could create a more interesting ranking of the sites that make the most money from their ads.
Here are the full lists of fastest growing sites by rank and annual growth rate (same as the charts above) and top ten display ad publishers:
- Fastest-Growing Sites
- Break Media* (+279%)
- Glam Media* (+144%)
- Infospace Network (+134%)
- NetShelter Technology* (+131%)
- Everyday Health* (+121%)
- CBS Corporation* (+111%)
- WildTangent Network* (+74%)
- Discovery Digital Media (+68%)
- WordPress (+64%)
- Demand Media* (+59%)
- Weatherbug Property (+59%)
- Answers.com Sites (+58%)
- Facebook (+57%)
- Yellow Book Network* (+51%)
- Ask Network* (+48%)
- AT&T Interactive Network* (+47%)
- JPMorgan Chase Property* (+45%)
- Hearst Digital Media (+42%)
- The Mozilla Organization (+40%)
- Sprint Nextel (+36%)
- Top-Ten Display Ad Publishers
- Yahoo Sites (37.1 billion)
- Fox Interactive Media (34.9 billion)
- AOL (18.2 billion)
- Facebook (13.7 billion)
- Microsoft Sites (13.4 billion)
- Google Sites (4.1 billion)
- eBay (2.7 billion)
- Viacom Digital (2.2 billion)
- Glam Media (2.1 billion)
- United Online (1.8 billion)
Hearst Digital Media acquired UGO.com so not all of their growth was organic.
yahoo! rocks!
Was this an embargoed story? It says the report will be released tomorrow. I’d like to know when TechCrunch breaks an embargo.
Sorry. The information about when TechCrunch will break an embargo has been embargoed.
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Wow, Facebook is definitely headed for a down round. According to my calculations, they served up 13,700,000 miles. Even if they got $10 CPM, they made $137,000,000. How is their growth first strategy working out now?
$10/CPM? Not a chance. I have used the FB ad platform, and even counting running multiple ads they are not getting more than $2/CPM.
Sad, but true.
$2 is the max I d pay. The reach is huge but they need to get their targeting right before they can be taken seriously.
The irony is the feedback on the ads. I keep giving thumbs down and I keep getting served the same ones. On a second thought…$2CPM is too much on facebook.
Interesting. Would of been interesting to see what would of happened with the advertising if microsoft acquired yahoo last year.
This list is another example of ComScore mixing networks and sites, then calling them properites, and ultimately confusing everyone.
If you look at your title, it says top growing sites. However, the majority of the names on this list are not sites. They are networks that roll-up a bunch of different sites to reach an aggregage number.
In most cases, their growth has little to do with their flagship sites. For example, EverydayHealth Network and Glam have grown this year by rolling up a number of Web sites that assigned over their traffic. Yet, in both instances, their flashship sites have had stagnant growth (per Quantcast).
Does the ComScore report give any indication of this? No. So why don’t they run two reports — one for the fastest growing sites and one for the fastest growing networks. That way when media quotes the fastest growing sites, they are actually listing sites.
Great fact you point out. The fact that sites are “assigned” other sites traffic is very misleading in these numbers. This assignment can occur in a few scenarios but the most likely is when a smaller site allows a larger site to sell their ad inventory. For this to happen, the large site requires the smaller site to “assign” their traffic to them. So for traffic calculations, traffic is often double counted (each site is able to count the traffic as their own).
Fastest growing??? Check out Quancast’s latest numbers for January. Everydayhealth is down almost 70 percent month over month. That is about 4 million uniques in one month. Guess the search engine advertising budget got cut.
check your facts, erick: “Everyday Health acquiring Revolution Health and Drugstore.com” Last time i checked, drugstore was a publicly traded company still: NASDAQ: DSCM.
You gotta love Keith Richman, CEO of Break Media who is just crushing it..
Congrats.
Ignore the ones with the asterisks… they pollute the more meaningful data.
Any reason why they focused just on Top 100? Top 20 of the 100 seems very limited. Why not do Top 20 out of 1,000? This would probably give a better barometer for the true traffic trends…
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Wow! WordPress is growing faster than Facebook! Amazing! And Mozilla is number 19, ahead of Sprint! This a victory for open source, clearly.
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It’s great to see Wordpress as number 9 on the ‘Fastest Growing Sites’. Wordpress has certainly managed to gain enormous brand loyalty whilst remaining attractive to large corporates and individual users alike.
thanks so this post
Break.com seems to be very good at getting frontpaged on Digg. While that drives a lot of traffic, is it valuable traffic?