We Made It Into The Icons of The Web, What’s Next?

How do you measure website success? It depends upon the aims for the website. If you want to sell goods then turnover and profit on sales may be good measures of success. Indeed companies like Amazon and Alibaba are so successful as online sellers that they generate more money than many countries. At the other end of the scale some people just run a website as a hobby, or want somewhere where they can post writing and images as an online web log, i.e a blog, and are not that interested if anyone else sees it. One measure of web success is the number page views by visitors, or hits, to a website. But how many page views does a web site need to make a difference. Well it appears half a million hits a year will get you into the top 0.1% of the World's websites.

Update: This article refers to the previous Tek Eye .biz domain address.

What Does It Take To Make The Top 0.1% of Web Sites?

Not much. But a lot more than what the other 99.9% of websites achieve.

So there are about 1.8 billion websites in the world running on 330 million domains, all served up by 6.3 million computers (see our article How Many Websites Are There In The World?). The Internet analytics company Alexa only tracks the top 1 million websites and just lists the top 500. What does it take to get into the top 1 million, or the top 500, or even the top 10.

Icons of the Web

The Icons of the Web project by nmap.org (the Nmap Security Scanner) used the Alexa rankings data. From the data, Nmap generated a visual representation of the popularity of the World’s top websites. Tek Eye managed to squeeze in, just. Somewhere around the point of the blue arrow shown in this picture.

Notice how most of the top 1 million websites (including this site) are tiny little dots compared to the big, globally dominating websites. The relative popularity of the website is shown by the size of it’s icon (favicon). When Icons of the Web was produced getting into the top 1 million websites meant you were in the top 0.1% of all the World's websites. However, making a leap to the top of website charts would be a real success story.

What Are Your Site’s Aims?

What did it take for this site to make the top 0.1%. This site is about adding a valuable resource to the Internet. And looking at all the top sites that is what they all do. They are a resource for the people that visit them. Even if in some cases that resource is of a questionable nature!

When measuring website success one metric is page views by real people. Our traffic levels are modest, about 10,000 page views per month. Drop below 8000 page views per month and you drop out of the top 1 million sites. To get to the top 500 list of websites the traffic needs to reach several million page views per month! A top 10 entry needs several 100 million pages views per month!

This site is not looking for a top 10 or top 500 place. However, a modest increase (double) in page views would send the site up several hundred thousand places in the rankings. How will that be achieved? By doing what all successful websites do. Providing good quality content and resources. If you are looking to run a successful website or on line business remember that a fast website with quality resources, products and services will rise up the rankings.

What does it mean for Tek Eye? Hopefully you will continue to find something useful within the content, and the future articles will keep Tek Eye in the top 0.1% of the World's websites. If Tek Eye achieves that then it will have contributed the Internet. Why not come back occasionally to browse our content.

See Also

• For a full list of all the articles in Tek Eye see the full site alphabetical Index.