Google's Top 1,000 List Includes 5 Investing Sites—And Why You Might Care

I trust that you will let me know if this blog starts sounding like a broken record. But some data became available this week that might give you added inspiration to plan for syndicating your content and exploring off your own asset manager domain.

I was checking my RSS feeds this morning when I came across the announcement that Google will now publish a list of the top 1,000 global sites on the Web by unique users as measured by Google’s AdPlanner. Huge, which is what I tweeted. Whether you’re buying online media or not, this is just interesting.

Then I thought I’d take a look at where sites in Google’s “investing” category ranked on the first list published, for the month of April 2010.

Fidelity.com is the only U.S.-based site on the top 1,000 list. Exactly five investing sites made it into the top 1,000: Two based in China, one based in India, another in Korea and Fidelity's.

Does the U.S. offer more choice, thereby fragmenting the traffic? I assume so. But the point can’t be lost that the Investing category is one of the smallest in the top sites list. The Banking and Finance Category, by the way, has twice as many names and greater U.S. representation.

And yet since the Web’s early days, investing has been one of the top interests of Web browsers. Hmm…

I’ve tried to use Alexa.com for top site information  previously and hadn’t been confident of the findings. The categories seemed duplicative and all of the sponsored links distracted from the results. I was eager to see what the Google data showed about the categories that are dominating the top 1,000 best-trafficked sites. And by now you can probably guess where this is leading.

Separate Internet and Computer Services-related categories total up to more sites, but the largest categories in the top 1,000 best-trafficked Web sites in April 2010 are Web Portals and Social Networking sites. Together they represent more than 13% of the top 1,000. With a few significant exceptions (e.g., Yahoo), most are much younger than “investing” sites and yet they’ve captured sufficient interest to break into a global top 1,000.

It’s not all about traffic volume, of course. That’s definitely not the case when targeting your asset manager advertising. And most asset management sites are information-only, not sites that Web users can use to invest as they can on Fidelity.com.

But the predominance of social networks and Web portals is significant in what it shows about where people worldwide like to go on the Web. If Google published the top 1,000 Web site list from April 2005 or even April 2008, the list would be materially different. More brand domains would have been on it.

The steady drip of data makes it more and more difficult to ignore the implications for your digital strategy in supporting what your firm wants to get done on the Web.