• by October 20, 2000

America Online, Yahoo! and Microsoft kept their spots as the top U.S. websites in the month of September while sports sites saw increased traffic, Jupiter Media Metrix reported today. The unique number of visitors at AOL's sites dipped slightly to nearly 61 million from 62.7 million in August. Unique visitors at Yahoo rose to 52.7 million from about 52 million in August.

Microsoft's sites remained at No. 3 with 51.4 million unique visitors, down from nearly 52 million in August.

Search engine Google.com broke into the Top 50 for the first time at No. 48 with 5.7 million unique visitors, the report said.

The Olympics, Major League Baseball and the start of the National Football League season helped increase traffic to sports sites. Sports sites had 25.9 million unique visitors in September, up 15 percent from the previous month.

General news sites increased 6 percent in unique visitors to 31.7 million on increased convention, debate and other election coverage.

More recently, Yahoo! found itself first on the Media Metrix top 10 sites list for the week ending October 15 with 9,607,000 average daily unique visitors.

It was followed by MSN.com with 9,387,000, Hotmail.com (5,035,000), Passport.com (4,346,000), Microsoft.com (4,137,000), Netscape.com (4,028,000), AOL.com (3,012,000), iWon.com (2,041,000), Real.com (1,952,000), and eBay.com (1,864,000).

DirectHit.com was the top gainer for the week ending October 15 with a 213.6% increase from the previous week. It was followed by TwistedHumor.com (107.1%), eToys.com (97.5%), Fool.com (92.0%), EA Online (88.9%), Quote.com (87.5%), DigitalCity.com (78.9%), CallWave.com (77.1%), ChickClick.com (72.9%), and RotoNews.com (69.9%).

Additionally, the Internet ratings report for the week ending October 15 from Nielsen//NetRatings showed a 119% rise in traffic at work for Navy.mil, the official website for the U.S. Navy. The bombing of the military ship U.S.S. Cole on October 12, 2000 prompted users to log on for the latest event updates. Navy.mil was the third fastest growing domain for the work audience, with 536,000 unique visitors logging on to the site for real-time news about the Navy ship. The website had 245,000 unique visitors for the previous week. Men accounted for 68% of the total traffic, while women comprised 32%.

- Anya Khait