What a difference a decade makes on the web

The internet can no longer be considered a new media, and can even now provide some salient history lessons. JOSH CATONE

By Josh Catone

Every month I get an email from comScore giving me a list of the top 50 sites in the US market (I also get emails about lists of top sites in other markets).

Occasionally there are interesting tit bits about trends that comScore has noticed over the past month, but for the most part things rarely change these days – Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are almost always at the top (in that order), with the expected cast of characters rounding out the top 10 – Amazon, Wikipedia, eBay, AOL, Fox (MySpace), etc.

In short, it’s generally not something I plan to write about each month.

But if things don’t change very much at the top month-to-month, I start to wonder what sort of effect years have had on the web. This is the internet, after all, and things go fast around here. Just five years ago we didn’t have Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, or Digg.

What about 10 years? I thought it might be interesting to look at the top 10 sites according to comScore from July 1998 and compare the list to today’s top 10. Where are the sites of yesteryear?

Today, comScore maintains just one top 50 list measuring use from home, work, and school. In 1998, however, its top 15 was broken up into separate lists for home and work use. We’ll use the home list for this post.

#1. AOL

AOL is actually still the fourth most visited collection of sites, and its ad network has the largest reach on the web. But, oh, how the mighty have fallen. In 1998 America Online was on the rise – one of the largest ISPs in the United States, and on the way to a $US105 billion market cap in 1999. Then, in 2000, it purchased Time Warner for $US164 billion. Big mistake. In 2002 AOL reported a loss of $US99 billion, and today AOL’s web assets are reported to be worth only about $US3-10 billion.

#2. Yahoo

Okay, so not everything has changed. Yahoo was second 10 years ago, and its second today. But it’s now in second place to Google, and that’s been a bad place to be, at least financially. The company was almost bought out by Microsoft, and narrowly escaped a proxy battle with billionaire investor Carl Icahn earlier this year. Once the darling of the web, Yahoo is still one of the most viewed properties and has some interesting and useful web 2.0 sites (Delicious, Flickr, Pipes, etc), but it has struggled to make money from all those eyeballs and is getting slaughtered in the most lucrative of online businesses; search.

#3. Microsoft

Microsoft is also still in third place today. It’s not competing on search, despite its best efforts, but with the largest cash reserves of any company competing for the future of the web, it’s hard to count Microsoft out.

#4. Excite

In 1998, Excite was pulling in a ton of traffic, but losing money. A $US6.7 billion merger with @Home couldn’t save it, and in 2004 it was purchased by IAC. The site still exists as a MyYahoo-style start page, but it has been largely forgotten.

#5. Geocities

Geocities, which was a precursor to personal blogging communities like LiveJournal and WordPress.com, went public a month after this list was published in August 1998. It quickly saw its share price shoot up from $US17 to over $US100, and was purchased by Yahoo before the bubble burst for $US3.57 billion. The site still attracts almost 13 million visitors each month, and Yahoo still operates it as a featureless free web host, but it is now overshadowed by blog communities like the aforementioned WordPress. Further, cheap and much more feature-rich web hosts like Dreamhost and Site5 make Geocities less relevant for anyone wanting more than a blog.

#6. Netscape

Netscape Navigator was one of the most popular and important web browsers of the early to mid-90s internet – 1998 was a big year for Netscape, but mostly because that was the year it started the open source Mozilla foundation that eventually led to the creation of the Firefox web browser.

It was also the year that Netscape was acquired by AOL for $US4.2 billion, which sadly proved to be the beginning of the end for the Netscape name.

Since, Netscape has gone from one of the most respected and well-known brands on the web to a site that can’t figure out its identity. Netscape.com has been everything from a browser download site, to a web portal, to a search engine, to a Digg clone, and now it just redirects to a slightly altered version of AOL.com. Netscape officially ended support for Netscape web browsers earlier this year and urged people to switch to Firefox or Flock.

#7. Lycos

Like Yahoo and Google, Lycos began life as a university project. Unlike Google and Yahoo, Lycos has been pretty much forgotten. The site now attracts just over two million visitors per month, according to Compete, and its traffic is down 73% on the year. In 1996 Lycos was one of the first profitable internet businesses and was sold in 2000 to Spanish firm Terra Networks for $US5.6 billion. By 2004, however, Lycos had fallen on hard times and was worth just $US95.4 million when South Korea-based Daum Communications Corporation (the current owner) purchased it.

#8. The WhoWhere Network

WhoWhere? Huh? Exactly. WhoWhere was an early people and email search directory that was acquired by Lycos in 1998. For what happened next, see number 7 above.

#9. Disney

No longer a top 10 property, Disney has fallen to number 22 (and it was actually number nine on both the home and work lists in 1998). That said, Disney is still hugely relevant in the teen and younger market. Last year, it even acquired the hugely popular Club Penguin site for $US350 million, pushing its reach into that market further. Disney also owns the television networks ABC and ESPN, which both have hugely popular online sites as well (ESPN is currently number 43 on the web, according to comScore).

#10. Infoseek

Infoseek was one of the web’s major 90s search engines. In 1998, it was purchased by Disney and used a year later as the basis of a search and portal venture called Go.com that drew content from other Disney properties (like ESPN, ABC News, and Family.com). Like most portal plays of the 1990s, Go.com didn’t work. It still operates as a gateway to Disney’s web properties, but it shut down its internal search feature in 2001 (today it relies on Yahoo search).

Josh is the lead blogger for sitepoint.com. He covers all things new and exciting on the web and is based in Rhode Island, USA.  

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