Top Websites Insight in August 2020
How The World’s Top Websites Can Be As Popular As Today
With the advancement of technology nowadays, information is just getting easier to retrieve. It can be said that we are just one click or one tap away to the (almost) anything we want to know.
Reflecting on how the internet has become an important source of information, it might be insightful to know how most visited websites can be popular as they are now.
In their website, SimilarWeb has published top websites ranking that is based on most traffic worldwide. Not only that, but SimilarWeb also has published similar rankings based on categories.
For this analysis, the retrieved dataset contains 5 most visited websites per category, based on the rankings SimilarWeb published for August 2020.
How Long Did People Spend Their Time Visiting These Websites?
Among the Top 5s for each category in SimilarWeb, 13 websites are on The Top 30 Most Visited Website. Referring to the colour code, Computers, Electronics and Technology category has the most number of websites stayed in Top 30, followed by News and Media.
Youtube.com has successfully attracted people to spend their time on their website, seen from the longest duration in one visit, followed by Naver.com.
Inferred from the categories of the websites listed in Top 30, we can see that people mostly spent their time on the internet by either scrolling social media, searching (for references, news, or maybe shopping), or watching videos.
How Many Pages Did People View in One Visit?
From this chart, it can be concluded that search portals and social media are the ones which had most pages per visit. Among these websites, Twitter.com and Instagram.com had nearly 12 pages/visit. Having 17 minutes of average duration in one visit, Naver.com was also the second most pages per visit (around 11).
How Many People Exit The Website after One Page?
According to the definition in SimilarWeb, Bounce Rate shows the percentage of visitors only viewing one page before exiting. In this metric, Wikipedia.org has the highest bounce rate, by reaching almost 60%, while Naver.com has the lowest bounce rate.
Where did The Traffic Come from?
Referring to SimilarWeb websites, six traffic sources generated traffic (on desktop): Direct, Referral (coming from other websites), Search, Social Media, Mail, and Display.
Based on the traffic sources of Top #5 websites in each category, most of the traffic came from Direct, in which people straightly went to the website. Coming in the second place of traffic source is Search.
If we go aggregating by the categories, the consensus is still intact, either Direct or Search. For the categories that most traffic came from Search, this somewhat makes sense to me, since for these categories, people may need to compare lots of references rather than straightly go to a specific source. For instance, one might look for the cheapest flight from London to Tokyo (Travel) is. Other people may need a reference for how to cook Italian Food (Food and Drink). Some may google how to fix something, or what these new terms they are hearing about (Reference Materials).
Social Networks
Social networks have been part of people’s lives nowadays, seen from big social media such as Facebook and Twitter have been Top #10 in Most Visited websites worldwide. This also impacts on others that they can be one of the most important traffic sources for our own websites or apps.
The chart on the left describes how many of those most visited websites listed these social networks as the Top 5 most traffic sources. Based on the retrieved data, 109 of 110 Top 5 websites has listed that Youtube is among the Top 5 of most traffic generating social network. Facebook and Twitter followed in the second and third places respectively.
It might be worth noting that some of these Top 5 websites listed local social networks in their Top 5 most traffic sources. For instance, Chinese websites listed Weibo and Douban, Russian websites mentioned Odnoklassniki and VKontakte as their most traffic generating social networks.
Seen from the categories perspective, Youtube and Facebook are still the most traffic generating source in aggregate. For Jobs and Career, Youtube and LinkedIn are in ties.
