playing with the internet archive 2003 - 2008
Published on the 29th of January, 2008
Yesterday I was showing my partner a website that I had made several years ago using the web archive and that got me thinking. A lot has changed in the last few years, online, so I jumped over to alexa to see who the top 100 websites were in 2003 (English only) and decided to do a sort of where are they now.
Way back in 2003 the top 10 most trafficked websites according to alexa were
- Yahoo (1)
- MSN.com (5)
- Google (2)
- passport.net (210)
- EBay (21)
- Microsoft.com (15)
- Amazon.com (19)
- Go.com (47)
- Hotmail (5 - now under MSN)
- aol.com (46)
Now do you clearly remember 2003? that was the same year that Chicago won best Picture at the Oscars, Tampa Bay won the super bowl and beyonce went number 1 with Crazy In Love. It was "only 5 years ago".
News was the big issue in 2003, for a year we could hardly remember it was certainly where our attention was at. The major portals that were bringing in the traffic figures, MSN, Aol, Yahoo may still all be in the top 100, but even excite was still holding on to a top 50 position. And there were no less than 13 news/portals in the top 100
Search engines will always be popular, but back in 2003 there were about 20 search engines, including such fond memories as overture, AltaVista and Lycos in the top 100. In 2008 they have largely been obliterated by the dominance of Google, of the current top 100 websites there are no less than 16 entries for Google using regional domains. Only about 6 search engines (yahoo, msn, Google, AOL, DMOZ ect) remain in the top 100.
do you remember gator.com? Software that made end users life a little easier by auto filling web forms was the bain of webmasters as they replaced advertising and affiliate links on websites with their own. Fortunately for us, they died a rather necessary death back in 2006, The only memory of them you may have is the lost revenue they stole from your affiliate links. Oh yer, they did manage to pull in at #13 back in 2003, they now live inconspicuously at #548,917 now if you had invested heavily in that little company back then you would probably would not have been very happy!
2003 was towards the end of what once was web 1.0 companies spent millions acquiring and building but never managed to monetize there acquisitions because of the drop in ad sales at the dawn of the new millennium. They spent their money acquiring old technology that was past its used by date instead of looking at the future. As an example let’s take a quick look at Lycos
Lycos once had over 1.2% of all traffic according to alexa, that figure 5 years later is down to 0.08% keep in mind that back in 98-99 they acquired 2 of the most potential websites on the internet, angelfire and tripod both of which were competing in the free hosting domain, where users were actively building and maintain what essentially was the for-runner to blogging, the personal homepage. By 2001 blogging had started to awaken and go main stream Lycos had a captive market ready and waiting and never took the step needed that would have taken angelfire or tripod head to head with Google’s soon to be acquired blogger.com (2003).
now forget competing with Google in search, the personal homepage war has been going ever since geocities first started and I doubt there are many serious web developers in the 25-35yr age demographic that did not once start out in geocities, angelfire or tripod. Geocities woke up to the world of blogging in mid 2006, surprise surprise, look at the traffic growth at that point. Lycos woke up as well, but by the time that happened the horse had already bolted.
Why tell you about this now?
I have another article I am working on for those of you out there looking to buy an established website that might just turn you off that "bargain" you just found, you know that proxy site, facebook application or myspace site you are thinking of buying. stay tuned!
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