What Are the Most Influential Sites on the Web?

Posted 11/25/2009 at 6:29pm | by Ryan Whitwam

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Analytics services like Alexa or Compete have often been cited as good ways to rank a website’s importance. But these options only measure website traffic. A service called ://URLFAN, however, measures a site’s influence by analyzing blog mentions. In this way, it’s a bit like Technorati but for all websites.

://URLFAN is currently ranking the popularity of 3,783,534 sites by checking 302,607,392 blog posts from 5,962,353 individual feeds. This appears to be updated in real time along with the stats. So what site takes the top honor? That would be en.wikipedia.org. This isn’t terribly unexpected. Wikipedia has a wealth of readily accessible information people might want to link to.

Youtube comes in just behind Wikipedia, and Flickr right after that. In yet another bad sign for old media, there’s only one newspaper site on the list, The New York Times. ://URLFAN probably isn’t a perfect measure of influence, but it does take a unique approach, and is well worth a look. Check out the full top 100 list updated in real time here.