So we're all wasting our time huh?

[Joe]

The BBC reports, "The number of sites on the web may amount to hundreds of millions but surfers seem to be spending half of their time visiting just four of them."

The full story can be found at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1373000/1373291.stm

Joe.

[Rich]

It's rumored that FutureQuest's forum *almost* made the list and came in at number 5.

Rich

[Dunx]

Funny thing... I don't go to any of the sites the report mentions with any regularity, and neither do any of the people I asked. So who were they talking to?

I reckon the MS one particularly is people who just don't know how to change their homepage in IE.

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Dunx

[PaulKroll]

Well, first yes, I'm sure many folks don't change their home page from MSN.

And you have noticed, haven't you, that no matter what site is your home page, IE will go to the MS site occasionally (about monthly I think) when it's first loaded to Check for latest version/security update? (It does this fast: usually you can't see it. As of IE 5.5, anyhow, they have an option in the Internet Options dialog (under Advanced) to turn this off)

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9704b.html has some good comments on the increasing returns for larger sites and some encouraging comments for smaller ones.

[Tom]

The article makes sense to me; it's what I see in my day job. By virtue of the fact that you're hanging out here, you're not necessarily representative of the larger majority of the online audience. I don't mean that as a slam, because I fit into that category, too.

People that are here in this forum building and operating web sites are much more technical, much more of an early adopter-type than the population as a whole. While I may have 500 sites in my bookmarks, and view hundreds of pages daily, my mom, my mother-in-law, my sister and other friend's lives don't revolve around the net nearly as much as me. They get on, do their thing with what they know and and find easy to use -- and get off after a while. Sure, they hit other fun sites, but not necessarily over and over, while they fall back to their regular areas each and every time time.

So, say a person hits Yahoo for 5 or 6 pages (because Yahoo is very clever at keeping you on their pages as long as possible) and then they bop out to 20 other sites. Next day, they hit Yahoo again for their 5 or 6, and then out to 20 different sites. See the trend? Same thing for AOL members, MSN members and so on. The numbers add up like you wouldn't believe.