Flashback From 1998: When Altavista, Lycos And Porn Ruled the Web

The Rankings
Home and Work, Combined
We’ll start where the report starts – at those sites most popular when combining home and work visits. (Please see above diagram for clarification.) Before I list them, I want you to try and think up what the top fifty websites were in 1998. Got it?

Yeah, you’re wrong.
AOL.COM 1998 rank: 1; 2010 rank: 3 (2010 data via Alexa)
YAHOO.COM 1998: 2; 2010: 3
GEOCITIES.COM 1998: 3; 2010: 1,778
MSN.COM 1998: 4; 2010: 13
NETSCAPE.COM 1998: 5; 2010: 3,676
EXCITE.COM 1998: 6; 2010: 726
LYCOS.COM 1998: 7; 2010: 1,335
MICROSOFT.COM 1998: 8; 2010: 22
BLUEMOUNTAINARTS.COM 1998: 9; 2010: 18,448,258
INFOSEEK SITES 1998: 10; 2010: 663,973
ALTAVISTA SEARCH 1998: 11; 2010: 2069
TRIPOD.COM 1998: 12; 2010: 400
XOOM.COM 1998: 13; 2010: 7,684
ANGELFIRE.COM 1998: 14; 2010: 745
HOTMAIL.COM 1998: 15; 2010: 1,417
AMAZON.COM 1998: 16; 2010: 11
REAL.COM 1998: 17; 2010: 1,324
ZDNET.COM 1998: 18; 2010: 669
HOTBOT.COM 1998: 19; 2010: 21,303
INFOSPACE.COM 1998: 20; 2010: 1,447
EBAY.COM 1998: 21; 2010: 7
DISNEY ONLINE 1998: 22; 2010: 117
SNAP.COM 1998: 23; 2010: 2,486
WEATHER.COM 1998: 24; 2010: 24
ICQ.COM 1998: 25; 2010: 402
BARNES & NOBLE 1998: 26; 2010: 227
SIMPLENET.COM 1998: 27; 2010: 207,614
CNN.COM 1998: 28; 2010: 18
MSNBC.COM 1998: 29; 2010: 750
PATHFINDER.COM 1998: 30; 2010: 28,694
MININGCO.COM 1998: 31; 2010: 1,814,486
DIGITALCITY.COM 1998: 32; 2010: 548,385
ESPN 1998: 33; 2010: 20
LOOKSMART.COM 1998: 34; 2010: 7,350
ETOYS.COM 1998: 35; 2010: 30,376
SONY ONLINE 1998: 36; 2010: 744
BONZI.COM 1998: 37; 2010: 1,379,611
FORTUNECITY.COM 1998: 38; 2010: 3,925
CNET SOFTWARE 1998: 39; 2010: 36
SWITCHBOARD.COM 1998: 40; 2010: 3,375
EARTHLINK.NET 1998: 41; 2010: 146
MAPQUEST.COM 1998: 42; 2010: 56
WARNER BROS. ONLINE 1998: 43; 2010: 783
ATT.NET 1998: 44; 2010: 175
WEBCRAWLER.COM 1998: 45; 2010: 686
GOTO.COM 1998: 46; 2010: 1,171,981
EGGHEAD.COM 1998: 47; 2010: 18,750,018
COMPUSERVE.COM 1998: 48; 2010: 5,445
CDNOW.COM 1998: 49; 2010: 1,663,586
MUSICBLVD.COM 1998: 50; 2010: 3,220,606

It’s amazing how many of those sites are search (Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos) and email (ATT, Compuserve, AOL). No wonder Google is now one of the two largest websites in America.

A question: Blue Mountain Arts was the ninth largest website in America? Its Wikipedia page has even been deleted – the ultimate online dis. It now ranks substantially below my personal blog, and I don’t even have terribly executed Flash greeting cards.

Of the sites in the top 50, an informal count indicates that I’ve been to six of them in the past month. Thirteen of the top fifty now are ranked 10,000th or lower – several are in the millions. It’s the damnedest thing that so many of the top sites in America could have essentially vanished. What could have happened. Congrats to CNN, ESPN, eBay, Amazon and CNET for actually moving up in the rankings – and much love to Weather.com, which hasn’t budged an inch in 12 years.

The rest of the home / work section establishes a pattern the rest of the document follows: articulating top sites by umbrella corporation, breaking individual sites out by category, and displaying total results by category. (The three cumulative rankings are viewable here.)

Here’s the combined home / work results by category. Tell me if you see anything odd about it.

Media Metrix would have you believe that not only is adult content not the most popular category – it’s barely more popular than government websites. That education sites are over 30% more popular. Let me just tell you, having lived through the late ’90s – education was not 30% more popular than sex. Maybe this is an artifact of the inclusion of work visits?

Home and Work, Separately

To answer the preceding question: nope. What you see above is the top categories for visits to sites from home. The sample audience was far more interested in educational opportunities and posing for Norman Rockwell paintings than the, erm, pleasures of the flesh. In 1998, it seems, Chatroulette would have been nearly penis-free.

A porn site does crack the top 50 for home visits – PORNCITY.NET is ranked at number 42. (These days, it’s 109,243rd.) Otherwise, the top 50 from both work and home is pretty similar to the combined chart. Please peruse the top 50 web properties and top categories segmented by home and work visits at your leisure.

Eight Months of Trends
The next lengthy section of the metrics document walks through thousands of sites to demonstrate longer-term trends in reach (which they define as the percentage of projected individuals within a demographic that accessed the site or category in a month). Here’s an excerpt of a page:

Lots of fascinating data here. Note that SEXPLOSION2.COM hasn’t yet caught up to the original SEXPLOSION.COM, but is still beating SEXSHOOTER’s negligible traffic. SEX-ON-THE-SIDE-CLUB.ORG (presumably a non-profit) is picking up steam, perhaps pilfering hyphen fetishists from the stagnating SEX-N-CHAT.COM. SEXROULETTE.COM is doing just fine.

Roll-Up Definitions
The very last section of the metrics book defines those properties that include a number of subdomains – such as how Yahoo now contains Geocities. I thought the most interesting way to present this data was by presenting a little quiz.

Guess The Parent Company
Here’s how this works. I’ll give you a domain, and you have to decide which of the listed options is the parent company. Click the answer you think is right.

Ready? Let’s begin.

RealFans.com. Is it: AOL, Bottom Dollar or Edmunds?

Sandwich.com. Is it: TVQuest, Yahoo or Broadcast.com?

Plight of the Tiger.com. Is it: Disney, USA Today or Unified Gamers?

Chinabyte.com. Is it: Symantec, Time Warner or News Corp.?

MTVCDLounge.com. Is it: Viacom, Music Boulevard Network or TheGlobe?

TheHellhole.com. Is it: Den Network, Excite or General Motors?

Dummies.com. Is it: Launch, IDG.Net or HomeShark?

VillainWeb.com. Is it: News Corp., Knight Ridder or Go2Net?

And with that, our tour of the Lewinsky-era web comes to an end. It was a time when Bloomberg.com had fewer than a million page views a month and Gawker didn’t even exist. (Or maybe it did. I didn’t really look very hard.) Real.com had ten times the traffic of Playboy and Google was a term paper. A time when something called Internet.com got more traffic than the NBA and SantaClaus.com combined (until December) – but all three combined garnered fewer visits than Slutfest.com.

If you have questions about particular domains, put them in the comments below, and I’ll do my best to answer them. And look for another post in the future: I expect the 2010 edition of this tome to be delivered to my house any day now.

It’s a 4,400-volume set.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.