It’s getting hard to keep up with the often contradictory web site ranking surveys that are hitting us from all sides. One of those surveys from Media Metrix – a company which these days likes to be subtitled ‘the PC Meter company’, it’s old name – reports that for March basically not much changed from the previous month. In the home market, aol.com is still top, with a 48.3% reach, by which it means the percentage of people involved in its survey that visit a site once in the month. Media Metrix uses software installed on users’ PCs that tracks their activities. Its rival RelevantKnowledge, also uses what is known as a panel-based approach, but does its surveys over the phone. Yahoo.com (42.8%) and netscape.com (27.7%) follow in second and third for home users, as they did in February. At work, the top three remain the same as well, but here yahoo.com (52.9%) is first, followed by netscape.com (41.1%) and aol.com (39.4%). In terms of web properties whereby Media Metrix consolidates all sites owned by the same company, Yahoo! Inc’s dominance among work users is further enhanced, achieving as it does, a 54.8% reach, followed by Microsoft’s sites and then Netscape.
