Internet uberbrand Yahoo! Inc continues to set the pace in terms of traffic to its sites, according to the latest report from web traffic analysis firm RelevantKnowledge Inc. Yahoo! and its recently-acquired Four11 free email service recorded 17.35 million people per day according to the Atlanta-based research company. Second is Netscape Communications Corp with 14.01 million, then Excite Inc with 10.87 million and Microsoft Corp just behind that with about 300,000 fewer. RelevantKnowledge does its research on a so-called panel basis, by recruiting people aged 12 and above randomly, and repeatedly question a set of users that have given various details about their web and lifestyle habits. Excite will probably be pretty pleased with its third place, keeping in touch with Yahoo! And Netscape’s progress will be worth tracking over the next few months, especially as it has now made it Netcenter online service the home page for the company, hoping to pull people in for news and other information, rather than merely the company’s software. Interestingly, RelevantKnowledge split out male and female web users for its December report. It calculated the percent of traffic from one sex or the other to a particular site, and found that Barnes and Noble Inc’s site was most dominated by women, with 43% of visitors being female, while ESPN Sportszone was the most male-dominated site, predictably enough, with 74% of its visitors being male. The presence of the University of Michigan as the fifth-most male-dominated site can be explained by the fact that Michigan were crowned joint champions of the College Football championships here recently. Presumably Barnes and Noble’s fierce rival Amazon.com had a pretty even spread between men and women and it does not show up on either list.
