• by August 22, 2000

As CMP Media reported yesterday, it was a bad week for consumer websites: Living.com ceased operation, Kozmo.com laid off about 10% of its workforce, and Wine.com and Wineshopper.com combined operations. So far, this year's dot- com fallout has resulted mostly in outright bankruptcies. And, according to the story, there's more bad news behind the bad news - this downward trend will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

There are, however, several sites that aren't too worried. Media Metrix - http://www.mediametrix.com - today released the top 50 Web and Digital Media properties for June 2000 and it looks like the leaders are settling down into the rightful positions. The top five for the month, not surprisingly, were AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Lycos and Excite.

Media Metrix July 2000 Internet audience measurement results also showed that retail categories were among the top-gainers within the company's 29 new categories and 63 new sub- categories, launched last month. Footwear retail sites had the highest increase in unique visitors, with traffic more than doubling from 533,000 unique visitors in June 2000 to 1.3 million unique visitors in July.

The retail food category increased from just over four million unique visitors in June to over 5.5 million unique visitors the following month, a 33% increase. The third top- gaining category, retail-furniture, also increased over 30%, from 1.5 million unique visitors in June to over 2 million in July.

Granted, visitor traffic isn't a perfect indication of a site's success, but it's clear that not all dot-coms are doomed to extinction.