September 15th, 2005
It's no accident: the six most visited sites all have IP voice offerings
Sister site IT facts lists the ten most-visited sites in August 2005, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings data.
I’ve just reviewed this list, and have just realized something.
Hey I know it’s Friday, and maybe your brain is a bit drained, but work with me here and tell me if you realize what I just did. All of them have some sort of IP voice capability to engage their site visitors.
The top six sites by audience measurement were:
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Yahoo!-101,283,000
- Microsoft-95,621,000.
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MSN- 92,059,000
- Google-80,354,000
- AOL-75,521,000
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eBay-55,181,000
OK, do you see what I see? The top five all can offer- or all busy working on -some form of Internet voice. Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL are all getting there by means of acquisition. And as eBay integrates Skype, that’ll make six.
This is far more than an interesting statistical fact. The big players who pride themselves on the most site visitors are looking at VoIP as a necessity.
Looking down the list, MapQuest ranks seventh. As a fully owned subsidiary of AOL, you could say they have a dog in this hunt, too.
You have to drill all the way down to #8 before you get to a company with no VoIP or even IM voice capability. That’d be Amazon, which counted 37,644,000 visitors in August.
But wait a second. If eBay buyers and sellers will be able to converse about merchandise over Skype, then don’t you think Amazon will want to offer the same capability? I see Net2Phone - a familiar legacy name that could use a rescue- as an ideal acquisition.
But hey, that’s another post.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
