If 85% of all the time spent on the internet goes to 15 websites, how can you get your piece of the pie?

In some of my past posts, I have discussed the principal of positioning your site as a your online marketing hub. The central point to which you direct visitors from your social media and online marketing activities.

Your website is where YOU can control your content, register visitors and ultimately convert them into clients. Understanding internet traffic patterns and the amount of internet visits that are going to the major social media, search and destination websites helps drive this principal home.

Lately I have been hearing that North Americans spend about 85% of their time on only 15 websites.

Which sites get the most traffic? You can probably guess most of them but according to ebizmba.com those 15 sites and their Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors are:

1. Google – 1,100,000,000

2. YouTube – 1,000,000,000

3. Facebook – 900,000,000

4. Yahoo – 750,000,000

5. Amazon – 500,000,000

6. Wikipedia – 475,000,000

7. Twitter – 290,000,000

8. Bing – 285,000,000

9. MSN – 280,000,000

10. eBay – 275,000,000

11. Microsoft – 270,000,000

12. Linkedin – 250,000,000

13. Pinterest – 150,000,000

14. Ask – 145,000,000

15. WordPress – 140,000,000

Just for fun, let’s take a look at the types of sites North Americans are spending the most time on. I have broken them down into 4 categories and listed the amount of traffic for each category. Some of them can overlap categories. For instance, YouTube is often referred to as the Internet’s second largest search engine. Since YouTube is often included in social media strategies and requires user generated content, I included it under the Social Media category.

Comparing these types of sites we can see that the top Search and Social Media sites and receiving more visitors than the top Shopping and Resource sites. Search and Social Media sites weigh in with about 4.87 billion; two and a half times the 1.94 billion visitors that the top Shopping and Resource sites are receiving. I don’t have stats for the actual time spent on these sites so I’ll leave that up to you to guess or research.

What does this all mean to you?

The total combined estimated unique monthly visitors to these 15 sites totals 6.81 billion unique visits from all over the world. So if the 85% holds true and if each visitor sends the same amount of time on each site visited (which of course they do not) this would leave 1.2 billion visits for all other websites. Obviously because we are comparing time spent on site with unique visits these numbers are way off, but I think they still provide a good idea of the scale the Internet has reached when it comes to visitor traffic. There are a heck of a lot of people online. They are searching for stuff, interacting with each other, shopping and buying and accessing resources to get informed.

How does your website fit into all of this?

Take a good look at your website or business model. If you want to attract visitors consider the above information and try to determine how you can leverage social media, search or perhaps these e-commerce and resource sites to attract more of your target audience to interact with your business.

If you have been racking your brains trying to figure out how social media and search can benefit you, the answer may become clearer looking at these sites and their traffic. Given the huge number of people visiting these websites, there is a super high probability that your target clients are visiting one or more of these sites on a regular basis.

Now the question becomes, how can you place your message in front of them on these sites and engage them when they are most likely to be receptive to or looking for information about your product or service?

From there, what message or offer will likely motivate them to click through to your website (the hub of your online marketing activities) or to contact your organization?

With 85% of internet traffic going to these 15 websites, answering these questions can be an important part of developing your internet marketing campaign.