Top Ten websites on cyberspace

Google is the num­ber one web­site on cyber­space accord­ing to Alexa.com. No sur­prises there. I kind of knew that any­way. Face­book is num­ber two and YouTube num­ber 3; again no sur­prises.
By Fareeha Qay­oom

Y

ester­day a friend (and a col­league) of mine asked me to pull the offi­cial world rank­ings of RTI Pakistan.com from Alexa. I under­stand Alexa.com is a web infor­ma­tion com­pany. It appar­ently tracks world traf­fic of all web­sites on cyber­space.

Photo by man­frysAccord­ing to them, “the Alexa Traf­fic Rank will show you how pop­u­lar the par­tic­u­lar site in ques­tion is com­pared to yours, includ­ing Reach, Page views and more. The search Ana­lyt­ics will show you which terms your com­pe­ti­tion is using to get traf­fic. The Audi­ence data will show you what kind of vis­i­tors your com­pe­ti­tion is attract­ing; the click-stream data will show you where your com­pe­ti­tion is get­ting traf­fic from affil­i­ate pro­grams and part­ners,” blah, blah, blah. I was excited – I thought, why not?  (RTI Pak­istan is our cur­rent project. We are work­ing on its con­tent right now. Unfor­tu­nately, since it’s under con­struc­tion and we are going through the exper­i­men­tal stage for the past two and half months — its in the prod­uct devel­op­ment phase of its prod­uct cycle!) – I was dis­ap­pointed to know there is no data avail­able.
But I decided to play with the site any­way. But first I decided to check Alexa’s top ten world rank­ing list­ing. It was given right there on the home page after top ten hot top­ics.
Top Ten Web­sites on cyber­space accord­ing to Alexa
Google is the num­ber one web­site on cyber­space. No sur­prises there. I kind of knew that any­way. Face­book is num­ber two and YouTube num­ber 3; again no sur­prises. Major­ity of web users do stop by at these three top sites at least once every day. I do that myself – Google every day, Face­book and YouTube every sec­ond or third day. It was down­hill from there as far as my per­sonal expe­ri­ence is con­cerned. Twit­ter sur­pris­ingly is num­ber eleven on the count­down. Hmmm.  See Table.

TOP Rank­ing web­sitesAccord­ing to Alexa.com as of Sept 25, 2010	World Rank on cyber­space
Google	1
Face­book	2
YouTube	3
Yahoo	4
Live	5
Baidu	6
Wikipedia	7
Blog­ger	8
MSN	9
Ten­Cent	10
Twit­ter	11

This was fun so I decided to do another search on Alexa. I decided to pull the top six Eng­lish news-sites from Pak­istan and check their world rank­ings…
Pakistan’s Top 6 Eng­lish Daily e-news sites
Sur­pris­ingly, Dawn.com is num­ber one with 3,517 on world rank­ing; (their tele­vi­sion chan­nel is not doing all that well, even though, they decided to go Urdu from Eng­lish).  The News Inter­na­tional is num­ber two with 11, 558 on world rank­ing (GEO Group) and Express Tri­bune is num­ber three with 13, 592. See table.

E-Newspapers of Pak­istan	Alexa.com world Rank­ing as of Sep­tem­ber 25, 2010	Rank in our list
Dawn	3517	1
The News Inter­na­tional	11558	2
Express Tri­bune	13592	3
Daily Times	15743	4
The Nation	31834	5
Busi­ness Recorder	41885	6

Again this was kind of fun. So I decided to check Tkfr.com in com­par­i­son to Aarzoo’s list of blogs from Pak­istan.
Tkfr.com in com­par­i­son with other Pak­istani blogs on cyber­space
I was pleas­antly sur­prised to know that Tkfr.com is actu­ally on Alexa.com list­ing – Yay!!!
It was also num­ber 3 when com­pared to Aarzoo’s list of most pop­u­lar blogs of Pak­istani ori­gin…
Fun­nily enough, we have never tried to pro­mote the web­site nor have we tried the var­i­ous gim­micks like fill­ing the SEO pack with key­words and other stuff that might increase the traf­fic. It was great to know where we fall on the world rank­ings. (Well, you might not think so but it’s pretty encour­ag­ing for Adnan and me!) espe­cially with me being tech chal­lenged and all.  See table.
Well, I must do this some more. Will keep you posted on my results. More later! ■

Pak­istani blogs Rank­ing in the world as of Sep­tem­ber 25, 2010
Pak­istani Blogs	Alexa.com world Rank­ings as of Sep­tem­ber 25, 2010	Rank in our list
All things Pak­istan	63,005	1
Cafe Pyala	288,826	2
Tkfr.com	2,429,211	3
Kala Kawa	3,814,327	4
DishoomDishoom	6,354,406	5
Be the Finance Guru	8,494,863	6
Lahori Khab­bay	22,313,671	7