Canadians' Top 100 Sites Revealed

Most One Degree readers are probably familiar with the “Alexa Traffic Rankings”:http://www.alexa.com/. Alexa, owned by “Amazon.com”:http://www.amazon.com/, uses its toolbar to track the popularity of every site on the Internet and then ranks them based on traffic. The ranking information is displayed in the toolbar and is freely available on their website for everyone else.
Alexa has always been an interesting tool for marketers. While the precision of the rankings is debatable, it does provide useful trend information and the unique data gathering methodology makes for an interesting comparison with ComScore. The one draw back was that you could only view the rankings on a worldwide scale, but this week, you can now “view the top 100 sites by country!”:http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?cc=CA&ts_mode=country&lang=none
Here are a few quick observations (feel free to add your own in the comments):
* Web2.0 sites like “MySpace”:http://www.myspace.com/ (9) and “Blogger”:http://www.blogger.com/ (11) are doing well in Canada
* “Amazon.com”:http://www.amazon.com/ (14) is much more popular than “Amazon.ca”:http://www.amazon.ca/ (52)
* “Apple”:http://www.apple.com/ (34) is in a tight battle with “Dell”:http://www.dell.com/ (35)
* Affiliate networks and ad serving companies rank highly most likely because users are briefly on their pages when they are redirected by an ad.
* My site, “RedFlagDeals.com,”:http://www.redflagdeals.com/ ranks 60th
Alexa rankings update regularly, so the list will change often. Over the next few weeks and months it will be interesting to see how sites move and which sites are able to break into the top 100.