Biggest Audiences and Impressions: The History of the Australian Web

So, how fast do things change online and how much have they changed over the last 8 years?

AIMIA has created a visual representation of where Australian's spend their time online.

Apart from anything else it is a beautiful piece of art that allows you to explore the underlying data in a highly visual format, filter results, stop and start the timeline, hover on the circles to drill down on the data, highlight/follow a particular website and experiment with different axis of information.

How is this knowledge relevant to you?

Well, apart from telling you where everyone visits online and how much time they spend there it demonstrates:

the web is making new winners all the time (where was Facebook before 2007)
...and losers (where is Altavista today?)
consumers are changing the activities they engage in online (eg the rise of social media sites)
pageviews are often just a representation of navigational arrangement of the sites concerned and doesn't necessarily mirror time people spend on the site or the number of unique visitors
filtering for search engines only you get a fascinating insight into search and directories:

Insight for Search and Directories

In 2001, Google was a distant third to Yahoo and NineMSN
Yellow and White Pages still have nearly constant audiences
Niche directories like TrueLocal and HotFrog have a lot of ground to make up in audience (reach) and page impressions
Audience and PageViews generally follow a linear relationship but time spent on a website can vary significantly.
None of the medically oriented directories warrant a mention in the "mass market" data (at least I couldn't find one!)