Xchanges

Survey Methodology & Data Collection
The methodology used for the survey was quantitative in nature. Across the span of the week of the survey I collected web traffic ranking data for each of the top 53 US sites in order to measure day-to-day fluctuations in web traffic and to see whether there was any significant increase or decrease in web traffic for any given site. At the end of the survey I then compared the top 49 US sites from the date of the start of the survey (February 1st) and the date of the end of the survey (February 7th). Four of the top 53 sites provide content that is adult in nature; therefore I excluded them from the survey, reducing the number of sites analyzed to 49. I would like to note, however, that I did visit these adult content sites on the iPod Touch, and three out of the four had optimized content for mobile computing devices.

The daily web traffic as indicated in table 1 was not just limited to US traffic—it reflects worldwide traffic figures. These figures account for the apparent discrepancy between US and worldwide traffic ranking, such as live.com (Microsoft’s Internet portal) and youtube.com (video streaming site) switching places during the week of the survey but not changing rank status when looking at only the US data set. The worldwide traffic ranking also explains missing numbers and sites, for example there is no site with a web traffic ranking of 10—this is most likely the result of the site being a foreign site; such as Amazon UK (or France or Germany), or one of the foreign Google sites such as google.uk.

Table 1 lists the data from the survey. The first column is the US web traffic three-month average ranking for the corresponding site in the second column. The next seven column pairs reflect the ranking of the web site based upon worldwide traffic. A quick glance will show some variation in traffic rankings. Again, some sites are missing from the data set due to the lack of correlation between worldwide visitors and US-only visitors.

Table 2 lists the top 49 US sites at the start and end dates of the survey along with change in ranking by web traffic. Of the sites listed there were no change in ranking among the top 22 sites. With the remaining 31 sites, there were ranking changes as much as ± 4 positions; of these sites, doubleclick.com (an online advertising site) and hulu.com (online streaming video site) each shifted their ranking upwards by four positions—37 to 33 for doubleclick.com and 53 to 49 for hulu.com—by the end of the survey. The biggest losers were rapidshare.com (an online file sharing site) and megavideo.com (another online streaming video site); each site dropped three positions, from 34 to 37 for rapidshare.com and from 50 to 53 for megavideo.com.

Table 3 reflects the list of the 49 sites that were visited with the iPod Touch and notes whether the sites were optimized for mobile content or not. Of the 49 sites, 19 (39%) were optimized for mobile content—these sites are shaded in the table. Notice that the nytimes.com site has an asterisk next to it; while the web site itself is not optimized for mobile content, there is a free NY Times application available from Apple’s iPod Touch/iPhone App store that will deliver optimized mobile content from the NY Times web site.