************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 2000 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** Who let the data out? I love statistics. I graduated with a BA in Psychology and a solid C+ average. The only psych credits I ever got A's in where the three required Statistics courses. When learning stats, the universe made sense. Freud didn't. I love pouring over stats and learning things like the GDP of Ghana or how much milk Skydome could hold. Knowledge is, after all, power. Stats about the net for a long time were pretty hard to come by. It was really anyone's guess how many people were online in 1996 or what was the most requested domain. Things changed when dot.coms began pouring huge dollars into advertising. No one wants to target a $2 million ad campaign based on figures a network guy worked out on a napkin at Starbucks. Fortunately for the stats junkie there's a whole range of interesting facts and figures (not to mention exciting charts and graphs) about the net to be found on the net. A great place to go for all sorts of interesting information about the state of the net, with a business focus, is TheStandard.com's metrics section (www.thestandard.com/research/metrics/). TheStandard.com reveals that despite all the focus on ecommerce and business- to-business commerce, the vast majority (76%) of net users are seeking out entertainment sites. Roughly a third prefers sports sites, a third prefers music sites, and a third prefers game sites. A number of the reports come from a company called Media Metrix (www.mediametrix.com). Media Metrix is sort of the Nielsen ratings of the net. Under the press release section the company has a number of interesting reports about the net usage. The most interesting set of stats Media Metrix regularly publishes is the Top 50 Most Visited Web sites. The top site visited in June was AOL. It had nearly 60 million unique visitors in the month. Rounding out the top three were Microsoft's various sites (for example hotmail.com) and Yahoo. No big surprises. Media Metrix recently published a study that took a lot of people by surprise. Women users are not as elusive as once thought. In the first four months of 2000, women users actually made up the majority of the net's users. Portals such as Yahoo and the Lycos family of search engines are top favorites. Of course, being popular doesn't ensure they have indexed the most sites or offer the most accurate searches. Search sites like google.com and northernlight.com seem to be constantly jostling for the title of most complete and accurate search engine. A great page to find out who's currently on top is the Search Engine Watch page. You'll find interesting stats at www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/. The Search Engine Watch tests search engines in interesting ways. For example, search engines try to eliminate "spammers" from their indexes. Some webmasters load up a page with keywords like "playboy" in hopes it will generate traffic and banner ad impressions. The Search Engine Watch page reveals which of the popular search engines deal best with this kind of noise. Even more revealing than what search engines people are using, is what they're actually searching for. A enlightening snapshot of North American culture can be had at Lycos' Top 50 searches page at 50.lycos.com. The Lycos Top 50 lists not only the search term's position but the number of weeks it's been on the list. The current Top 50 longevity champs are, not surprisingly, Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson. They've been on the Lycos Top 50 for over a year. Interestingly enough the Japanese Dragonball Anime series has likewise been a chart topper for more than a year. Dragonball rates higher than searches for information on the TV show survivor. When was the last time you heard people chattering about Dragonball around the lunchroom table? Is North American society ignoring a potent social undercurrent? Well, you heard it here first. Dragonball is going to be the next big thing. See how exciting stats can be?