By categorizing each of the top 100 websites by type and ranking each by its growth in "reach" (defined as percentage of all Internet users who use the particular website, based on data from Alexa) over the past two years (November 2004 through November 2006), Alexa decides what types of websites are growing in popularity and which are not. Here's the result, showing how fast various categories have extended their reach with representative examples of the fastest growing websites in each category:
1. Media Sharing: youtube.com, flickr.com
2. Search: google.com, baidu.com, google.com.br, live.com
3. Blog: blogger.com
4. Utility: megaupload.com, rapidshare.de
5. Social Networking: myspace.com, orkut.com
6. Informational: wikipedia.org, digg.com
7. Software: sourceforge.net
8. Portal: qq.com, yahoo.com.cn
9. Commerce: craigslist.com
Alexa also group the websites geographically to see which regions of the world have the fastest growth. In order of growth in reach (with faster growth higher up the list), the ranking by geographical region, with examples of high growth websites in each category, is:
1. South America/Mexico: google.com.br, google.com.mx
2. Eastern Europe/Russia: google.pl, yandex.ru
1. South America/Mexico: google.com.br, google.com.mx
2. Eastern Europe/Russia: google.pl, yandex.ru
3. India: google.co.in
4. U.S./Canada: google.com, youtube.com, wikipedia.org, blogger.com, myspace.com, orkut.com
5. Western Europe: rapidshare.de, google.co.uk, google.de
6. Middle East: google.com.sa
7. Asia: qq.com, baidu.com, yahoo.com.cn
