Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Craigslist - "For sale" and "Men Seeking Men" are very popular

Just taking a short break from my alexa analysis...I thought I'll dig a bit deeper into craigslist. Craigslist, for the uninitiated, is an insanely popular local site. But what do people really do on it?

According to alexa, 88% of the traffic of craigslist is from the US. And within the US, the city wide breakup is:

SF Bay Area 13%
New York 8%
Los Angeles 7%
Seattle 4%
San Diego 3%
Chicago 3%
Boston 3%


Now, within the above mentioned cities, which sections on Craigslist are most active?
Let's compare two of the more popular cities on Craigslist:

Over a period of the last 7 days, the level of activity in various sections in San Francisco and New York were as follows:

San Francisco

New York





Community 906
Community 10609
Personals:

Personals:
Strictly Platonic 1035
Strictly Platonic 1240
Women seeking Women 6112
Women seeking Women 570
Women seeking Men 1070
Women seeking Men 1510
Men seeking Women 4001
Men seeking Women 7007
Men seeking Men 11015
Men seeking Men 16160
Misc Romance 232
Misc Romance 229
Casual Encounters 11604
Casual Encounters 14370
Missed Connections 1684
Missed Connections 1550
Total 31253
Total 42636
Rants and Raves 3913
Rants and Raves 3560
Housing 31570
Housing 69540
Jobs 7685
Jobs 7304
For Sale 132750
For Sale 72760
Services 27550
Services 36140



So what conclusions can one draw from the above tables?

  • Clearly the 2 cities exhibit very similar patterns.
  • Most people use craigslist to buy and sell stuff(hardly a surprise! That was the first reason why I had started using craigslist) San Francisco did have a little disproportionately high number of postings in this category compared to NYC. What does this say? Maybe San Franciscans get bored of their stuff quickly?
  • Men seeking Men is the Personals sub-category which uses craigslist the most. I was a little intrigued by that one. It is possible that this might be an anomaly given that San Francisco and New York are famously gay cities. I'll check this trend in other cities.
  • From what I understand, job postings are the major sources of revenue for craigslist. However the number of postings in the job section were not that high (compared to the other sections). However, based on the above data, we can't really conclude if the number of viewers of this section is lower or higher than the other categories.


Sunday, December 9, 2007

Graph of top porn/adult sites in Alexa Top 1000

As was promised earlier, here I share the top adult sites on alexa...

The graph shows a few of the sites.
To see the complete list of adult sites, you can go here...

Alexa Rank by Website

I suppose the interesting thing about these sites is they do span a bunch of different categories. Clearly video is the most popular category, but you can see file sharing sites, social networks, advertising networks and publishers (sites which try to do everything)

Porn dominates top 1000 sites on Alexa

Porn dominates the top 1000 sites on Alexa. Almost 8% of the top 1000 sites were primarily adult content. I don't think this is a surprise (although this is a higher number than what I initially expected about the top alexa sites). Most people probably already know that porn is the most prevalent content on the web. But it still amazes me how many sites which are all pretty similar can co-exist and thrive. There were 79 porn sites in the top 1000 in alexa - and here I am talking about pure porn sites. If you start including all the picture sharing and file sharing sites (I am told a site like flickr has almost 50% porn content), where porn is also "one of the major" pieces of content, that number would rise dramatically.

So what are the learnings?
1. If you are looking to make some quick bucks, you probably have the highest chance of success if you engage in porn business
2. Advertising networks like adbrite are probably doing excellent business because they have unabashedly supported porn sites.
3. Even if you are trying to execute some non-porn website/idea, you are better off using porn as a "door to the customer"

The list of top adult sites on alexa is here.

And yeah, why is this my first analysis from the list? simply because it's so much easier to identify porn sites compared to any other type... (foreign, english doesn't matter - its pretty easy to identify a naked chick on any site)

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Get the complete list of top 1000 sites on Alexa here..

You can have the list for $5. The list contains the names of all the top 1000 sites, their reach, rank, page views and the countries where the sites have maximum penetration. Compared to the amount that Alexa charges, I think this is a sweet deal and there's more info than what alexa would provide you with!




Wednesday, December 5, 2007

About Me



The Web Dude - Maybe I can't be Spider-Man but I sure can be the Web-Dude.

Maybe you found something I wrote interesting, or maybe you just have some interesting website/idea that you would like to share. Feel free to reach me at webelot@gmail.com

I respond to all queries.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Alexa Top 100 Sites

So I am done going through the top 100 sites.

I realized it's not that easy to categorize the sites. All the sites have started looking very similar to each other. Search Engines look like portals, File sharing sites and picture sharing sites are not that easy to distinguish. Almost every site is a "community website". And adult content galores everywhere!!

Anyhow before I talk about the salient points, here's a sweet graph that Swivel generated for me

Number by Category

So what are these sites all about?

1. Search Engine domination was largely by virtue of google.com and its various variants (such as google.pl) being top sites in different countries.
2. Porn/Adult content made only 3% of the sites in top 100. I wonder if this trend will prevail.
3. It's not surprising to see everyone starting yet another social networking site or a video site given how many of them are doing well.
4. Outside of .com domains, .jp (Japan) and .cn (China) domains did well on the list.

More analysis follows as I finish going through all top 1000 sites.

Monday, December 3, 2007

What do people do on the internet?

So the question I started out with is what do people do on the internet?
Probably the best place to start answering that question is by looking at the top sites on the web. And I couldn't think of a better way to do so than by looking at the Alexa ranks.

Love Alexa or hate alexa but it's still one of the fastest/cheapest ways to gauge the popularity of any site. It's reasonably accurate for the top 1000 sites (some say it's pretty good for top 10000 sites).

So anyway, some of my subsequent posts will be about my analysis of the top 1000 alexa sites. I have been curious about the sites that people go to, what's common amongst them, what's unique about them and the geographic scope that they have. The following analyses try to answer all these questions. Hope you find it useful in whatver you are doing in the bad wide world of Web 2.0

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Table with the top Adult sites on Alexa and links to them

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.