Study: Amazon Passes eBay in Total Traffic

Amazon jumped ahead of eBay during the month of February to become e-commerce's most visited Web site, according to a study released Tuesday by Jupiter Media Metrix.

Amazon rose from the No. 11 position overall in January to No. 10 last month with a marginal increase of 71,000 unique visitors, to 18.0 million. However, eBay fell from 10th to 12th with a significant drop in monthly traffic, from almost 19 million in January to just under 17 million last month.

The top five most visited sites overall remained the same, with AOL Time Warner, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Yahoo!, Lycos and Excite finishing ahead of the pack. All five saw visitor traffic increase slightly from January to February.

The Top 50 continues to be dominated by news content providers and search engines, with e-tailers comprising only a very small portion of the list. Interestingly, no career-related sites broke the Top 50, despite a study released last month by Alexa Research that showed traffic to job sites soaring by 47.7 percent in January.

Walmart.com Slides

For the first time since Walmart.com relaunched its site in October 2000, there’s a new brick-and-click retail shopping site leader. Sears.com was first in February with 2.67 million unique visitors, although it failed to crack the overall top 50.

Walmart.com fell from first to third among brick-and-clicks with 2.34 million visitors, with Kmart’s BlueLight.com grabbing the second spot at 2.58 million.

Barnesandnoble.com took a plunge, falling from 44th overall with 7.1 million visitors in January, to 49th in February with 6.1 million. Besides Amazon, Barnesandnoble was the only online bookseller to make the list.

Travel sites (excluding MSN’s Expedia) were also few and far between on the top 50, with Travelocity coming in at 41st.

The Good Love Bug

Online greeting card companies cashed in on Valentine's Day, with unique visitors to American Greetings jumping from 7.3 million in January to 9.0 million in February, bumping the site up from 42nd to 24th in the rankings.

Also benefiting was Bluemountainarts.com, part of the Excite Network, which gained 4 million more unique visitors in February than in January.

Growing Numbers

The Jupiter Media Metrix study predicted that the number of people online in the U.S. will increase 13 percent in 2001, to 138 million.

According to the study, the total number of minutes spent online increased 51 percent over the same period last year, from 64.8 billion minutes in February 2000 to 97.7 billion in February 2001.

"Time spent online will continue to be driven by people's increasing familiarity with the Internet, the availability of more relevant content, and the adoption of Internet applications such as instant messengers, media players, file-swapping programs, and games among other services," Jupiter senior analyst David Card said.