by Student X
Member since:
February 12, 2006

Where Gather Stands in Relation to the Rest of the World Wide Web

July 17, 2006 01:58 AM EDT (Updated: July 17, 2006 01:58 AM EDT)
views: 154 | rating: 10/10 (10 votes) | comments: 25
**Just as a note, any characters you can't read, are Asian Characters, and, are not well-processed by gather's system.

A few years ago, Amazon.com launched a website that monitors traffic all over the internet--alexa. I'm a frequent visitor of the site. I enjoy seeing which sites are most frequented. Right now, the top 10 sites visited globally are listed below in rank from highest rank to lowest rank.

1) Yahoo!
2) Microsoft Network (MSN)
3) Google
4) Baidu
5) 腾讯网
6) MySpace
7) æâ€"°æµªæâ€"°éâ€"»ä¸­å¿Æ'
8) Yahoo!ã‚«ãÆ'†ã‚´ãÆ'ª
9) EBay
10) 网易

If you look just at the United states, the rankings change slightly.

1) Yahoo!
2) Google
3) Myspace
4) Microsoft Network (MSN)
5) EBay
6) Amazon.com
7) Craigslist.org
8) CNN - Cable News Network
9) Go
10) Live.com

Now, these lists change daily. All the time sites are moving up and down. Last week, I believe, myspace was 2nd or 3rd globally, this week it's 6th. There was a time when facebook was the 2nd most visited site in America. It's since dropped to 17th. Needless to say, 17th isn't exactly something to sneeze at. I mean, there are a lot of websites online. So, I decided to figure out where gather.com stands in the scheme of it all. Below is a decent picture of gather.com's status among it's fellow webpages.

Gather over the past 3 months is the 9,135 most visited site on the internet. It's rank has gone up in rank by nearly 1,500 over the past 3 months. This week, it was 8,232 most visited page. needless to say, more and more people are jumping on the gather train (woowoo, come ride it).

Over the past 3 months, the average gather user has viewed 12.7 pages per visit. The 1 week average: 10.

People who visit gather, also frequent:
And now, my favorite fact of all, and gather management, I hope you pay attention to this one. Alexa puts gather at the bottom of site loading speeds. 63% of other sites, says Alexa, load faster than gather. Gather's average page loading time is approximately 2.7 seconds. Compare that to google's .9 second page loading time, facebook's 2.0 second loading time, or myspace's 2.2 seconds of loading time per page. And when we're talking small loading times like that, .5 seconds can mean the difference between, well...a lot. Basically, 2.7 seconds is too long.

Regardless, there you have it. That is where gather stands.
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Comments: 25

Kathryn E. Jul 17, 2006, 2:27am EDT
Excellent research, Joshua. Enquiring Gather minds want to know about Gather and you deliver. Ranking and load speed, top on our minds.
Kathryn E. Jul 17, 2006, 2:29am EDT
I hope this article makes it to number 1 top viewed article. It is THAT important.
Stephalicious B. Jul 17, 2006, 3:38am EDT
"I hope this article makes it to number 1 top viewed article. It is THAT important."

No offense to Joshua, but I really don't think this article is THAT important.

I would much rather see an article like this one by Sean-Paul Kelley make it to the top:

The $14.5 Million Iraqi Healthcare Centers US Taxpayers Bought

Sean-Paul's article is actually real journalism and hits a very important subject. While I think stats on Gather are interesting, I hardly think it is SOOO IMPORTANT that it should be number one when we're at war in the Middle East.

PS Joshua, thanks for posting this information, it is interesting.
Carolyn Madden Jul 17, 2006, 5:49am EDT
Yes, it is interesting. The only sites mentioned above that I also visit are google and cnn. One because I like to check facts I've heard on gather, the other because the war in the middle east IS more important.

I've found the time to load a page here has improved since Andre moved in. Would be interested to see if that stat improves now. Thanks Joshua.
Dolphi D. Jul 17, 2006, 6:25am EDT
Excellent research, Joshua! I have a kind of interest in statistics. So your article makes an interesting reading for me.
Madame Donna C. Jul 17, 2006, 11:00am EDT
Joshua, Thanks for the info, very interesting.
Aileen F. Jul 17, 2006, 12:19pm EDT
According to Foxfire, this page loaded in 2.329 seconds.

This is interesting, Joshua. I hadn't realized that info was out there.
Aileen F. Jul 17, 2006, 12:19pm EDT
And posting my comment took 15.625 seconds!
Gerald S. Jul 17, 2006, 12:36pm EDT
"2.7 seconds? If that's the average then somebody else's must be loading REALLY quick."

Ditto that. Since the new Gather premiered, pages occasionally take so long to even begin to load for me that my browser gives up and displays a "the server is taking too long to respond" message -- and this is with DSL, and using the ever-reliable Firefox. It seems that it has gotten better in the last day or two, though.

Some interesting stats, Joshua. I'd forgotten all about Alexa.com.
Stephalicious B. Jul 17, 2006, 1:22pm EDT
I did want to note that Alexa ranks traffic. It doesn't necessarily tell you how many independent visitors are coming to the site. So if the same number of people are hitting Gather over and over again, that would increase traffic levels. It's likely that some sites with similar or lower rankings to Gather actually have a higher number of unique visitors.
Diana Raabe Jul 17, 2006, 4:40pm EDT
Interesting research. Stephanie adds some good points.
Student X Jul 17, 2006, 5:42pm EDT
Stephanie, it actually does rank independent visitors. I didn't put up the stats. But when this article was put up, alexa was ranking gather at about 85-95 unique visitors per 1 million internet users. Compare that to myspace's 34,500 unique visitors per 1 million surfers.
John S. (arizona) Jul 17, 2006, 5:48pm EDT
I'd say that number is about right. It takes me about 2 or 3 seconds to load this page. I have cable though.
John S. (arizona) Jul 17, 2006, 5:51pm EDT
I just tried again from an email notification. It was between 1 and 2 this time.
Edward Nudelman Jul 17, 2006, 6:18pm EDT
Joshua, this is a great article. I really appreciate hearing this kind of data. It does irk me that loading times are slow. It's a key problem, indicative of all the functions going on here (publishing, searching, commenting, imaging, etc.) Joshua... is this a technical problem or a monetary problem. That is, does Gather need more people to figure it out, or bigger servers (or whatever) to make it run?
Student X Jul 17, 2006, 8:16pm EDT
Ed, what i find most interesting about it s that if it is a monetary problem, if it's a technical problem, or if it's a technical problem compounded by monetary problems, it will only get worse with more regular usership. yet, rather than fix it, they keep telling us they'll fix it, and then, they continue to campaign for more users. It seems to me, the problem is a bit cyclical.
Nancy S. Jul 17, 2006, 9:12pm EDT
This is really interesting. Thanks for letting us know this stuff, cause I never would have found it on my own.
And I do think this is an important article, especially to us gatherholics!
Jeff Cusson Jul 17, 2006, 9:19pm EDT
Regarding the slow loading problem... "fixing" the slow loading problem means more servers and more people to work on the problem, which means a need for more money, which means a need for more users to generate more money. All these things work together.
Kat B. Jul 17, 2006, 9:32pm EDT
You have to take Alexa ratings with a grain of salt. They are not absolute numbers and are only relatively useful. Their traffic numbers are based on data collected from users of the Alexa toolbar.

Here is the link to how they collect the data; note the disclaimers at the bottom of the page:

http://www.alexa.com/site/help/traffic_learn_more
What Nonsense Jul 17, 2006, 11:06pm EDT
Good points and I laughed hard at that one Aileen! I never heard of "GO" so I went, but then I was confused and came back. I also went to the Japanese ones just for fun (you can see how bored I am)
Often my stuff loads reasonably well, except as my fearless leader says, on the long threads, and then it's a good minute. well, ok, feels like it. sometimes I wander off.
Joshua, I think this is a great article (and I don't need two posts to say so) and I liked your rebuttal. Along with Carolyn I also mostly just use google.
PS article in the Boston Globe today that mentioned Gather, and how it is intended for older educated folk. Hmmm. If I could spell I would fit both categories.
Sandy (Site Psychic™) Knauer Jul 17, 2006, 11:31pm EDT
Older than what and more educated than what? Sorry, just being difficult here. I might be at least one of those.

Is there a reason for wanting to be the biggest? Isn't there something to be said for the top notch, mom&pop, neighborhood grocery that stood its ground?
Kathryn E. Jul 18, 2006, 1:18am EDT
The demographic that Tom mentioned a month ago in his "live" article stated that Gather's average age is 44 and that 72 percent have a college degree. The Boston Globe likely drew its statement about Gather constituency from Tom's statistic.
Laura C. Jul 18, 2006, 12:50pm EDT
I love this service just as much as any of you. But let's try and remember that it's FREE. Yes, so many of you love Gather just how it is today, but things have changed and will continue to evolve, hopefully for the better. The only way it will survive is by spreading the word to acquire new members, and therefore secure new advertisers. As in any startup, there will be growing pains. Try and remember all of the hard working people over there at Gather before complaining too much, okay?
Gerald S. Jul 19, 2006, 9:03am EDT
"Try and remember all of the hard working people over there at Gather before complaining too much, okay?"

I mostly agree with you, Laura, but I do think there's a difference between just complaining and offering constructive criticism. Many of the articles and comments I've read regarding problems with the new version of Gather have dealt with issues - like the sometimes unreasonably slow loading times - that could easily discourage new members (and even existing members) from participating in the site.

That said, I give Gather credit for addressing at least some of these issues fairly quickly.

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