So what happened to September’s list? Consider September’s list to be the prototype for an upcoming list that I will present shortly.
I’ve made some radical changes to this list in order to accommodate my new criteria. This list includes the following criteria:
- you must be a nonprofit or you must be a non-profit that is intricately involved with nonprofit work
such as volunteermatch.org - you must be listed in GuideStar.
- you must be listed in Quantcast
The visitor figures are an average from the latest figures from Compete and Quantcast.
I basically took the Quantcast list and started from the top searching for .org domains. If the domain was run by a nonprofit and it was in Guidestar, it was included. I stopped at number 25.
Without further ado, here’s the list:
Philanthropy and Non-Profit Top 25 for October 2007
| Site URL | Monthly Visitors (in millions) | Nonprofit | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| wikipedia.org | 40.50 | Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| wikimedia.org | 3.78 | Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| consumerreports.org | 3.18 | CONSUMERS UNION OF UNITED STATES INC | 501c3 Public Charity |
| pbs.org | 3.15 | Public Broadcasting Service | 501c3 Public Charity |
| pbskids.org | 3.00 | Public Broadcasting Service | 501c3 Public Charity |
| thinkquest.org | 1.99 | Oracle Education Foundaiton | 501c3 Public Charity |
| kidshealth.org | 1.97 | Nemours Foundation | 501c3 Public Charity |
| aarp.org | 1.64 | AARP | 501c4 Public Charity |
| bbb.org | 1.61 | Council of Better Business Bureaus | 501c6 Public Charity |
| archive.org | 1.58 | Internet Archive | 501c3 Private Operating Foundation |
| npr.org | 1.53 | National Public Radio, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| worldcat.org | 1.35 | OCLC Online Computer Library Center | 501c3 Public Charity |
| lds.org | 1.24 | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints | Unknown |
| familydoctor.org | 1.10 | American Academy of Family Physicians | 501c6 Public Charity |
| kaiserpermanente.org | 1.09 | Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc | 501c3 Public Charity |
| caringbridge.org | 1.06 | CaringBridge | 501c3 Public Charity |
| americanheart.org | 1.06 | American Heart Association, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| akc.org | 0.93 | American Kennel Club | 501c4 Public Charity |
| alternet.org | 0.79 | Independent Media Institute | 501c3 Public Charity |
| mayoclinic.org | 0.72 | MAYO FOUNDATION FOR MEDICAL EDUCATION & RESEARCH | 501c3 Public Charity |
| cancer.org | 0.72 | American Cancer Society, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| redcross.org | 0.69 | American National Red Cross | 501c3 Public Charity |
| wikibooks.org | 0.66 | Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| volunteermatch.org | 0.65 | Impact Online, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
| wiktionary.org | 0.65 | Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. | 501c3 Public Charity |
As you can see, the Wikimedia Foundation and PBS are the only nonprofit entities that have more than one URL in the top 25. I hereby declare Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. the “most successful nonprofit on the Web” with an astounding 45.59 million visitors per month. Sorry folks, you can talk about quality and context all you want, but quantity has a quality all its own. To put that into some perspective, the Great Mall of America (America’s largest mall) receives 42 million visitors PER YEAR. PBS is not so shabby itself with 6.15 million visitors a month coming to pbskids.org and pbs.org.
There are lots of surprises here for me. There are quite a few URLs on the list that I’ve never visited. I’m really excited to ask questions of the people who run worldcat.org and caringbridge.org. How did they manage to build such a large site with little or no traditional marketing support and with no Web 2.0 buzz? I can understand how wikipedia.org became the biggest site in the nonprofit Web. The value proposition of Wikipedia became evident to everyone in the last few years. However, caringbridge.org and worldcat.org don’t exactly get a lot of blogosphere love so I’m really excited to learn about them.
And for those of you who still don’t think web site statistics don’t matter for nonprofits and aren’t an important part of assessing how a nonprofit should operate, I think it’s important to note that for some reason these organizations thought it was important to get site traffic. This isn’t a matter of Internet largesse that was bestowed upon these organizations. It was a lot of deliberate work involved. The vast majority of us are destined to live in the long tail — that’s OK. However, these people are in the fattest, juiciest part of the long tail. Don’t you think that they might have lessons to teach all of us?
This top 25 list is in recognition of the hard work and devotion to user communities, SEO, online and offline marketing, Web site design, application development and general operations management that it took to get these stratospheric traffic levels. It is a benchmark for any of us who strive to greatness whatever our missions are. Kudos to the management staff at these sites. They seriously rock!
Loading ...
