• by April 24, 2001

Diameter, a division of DoubleClick and comScore Networks today released their first web property report and the results may surprise you.

As it turns out, during the month of March, more than half of the traffic to U.S. websites (56%) came from international visitors, while 44% of the traffic came from U.S. visitors. Additionally, within the U.S. audience, the at-home segment led the way, representing 58.5% of all visitors to U.S. websites, while 33.8% of traffic came from people surfing from work and 7.7% of the traffic came from the university/college audience segment.

The number one ranked property, Microsoft, with 215.8 million unique worldwide visitors, generated 57% of its traffic from international visitors and 43% from U.S-based visitors. Yahoo was the second most visited property globally, with 195.7 million unique visitors, 55% from international and 45% from the U.S.

There is substantial variation in the composition of traffic by property. For example, Napster, the tenth largest property for the month of March, with 56.7 million unique worldwide visitors, generated 68% of its traffic from international visitors and 32% from U.S-based visitors. In contrast, Classmates Online and iVillage produced the majority of their traffic from U.S. visitors (77% and 74% respectively).

According to the release, because it is reporting visitor traffic from a broader set of audience segments and utilizing much larger sample sizes, netScore Traffic has a higher level of accuracy than other Internet audience measurement services.

The companies plan to issue this report on a monthly basis. For purposes of these reports, a property is defined as an aggregate of web sites that are controlled by a larger entity.