If you want to know how successful a web site is, you look at its traffic, right?
    Maybe. But maybe in as fluid and hyper-linked a medium as the web, it's not just about how many people arrive at a site. Maybe it also matters what kind of general presence a web site has--how visible the site is within the universe of the internet, how likely it is a surfer will encounter the site as he or she roams cyberspace.
    As intangible as this sounds, it's an idea that has recently begun being measured.
    And the results appear to demonstrate that web sites can be more visible to people coming online than traffic measurement alone may indicate. 
    In fact the idea of visibility, as proclaimed and measured by a company called Word of Net, offers a renewed argument for the power of community on the web. 
    In the month of December--during the height of the holiday shopping season--the most visible sites on the web were community sites, not commercial ones. 
   The No. 1 most visible site on the web in December was Geocities.com, Yahoo’s community site, replacing America Online’s web site, aol.com, for the first time since the so-called Visibility Index Top 50 was introduced two months earlier.
   Aol.com moved to No. 2, while AOL’s own community site, Members.aol.com, remained at No. 3.
    Tripod.com and Angelfire.com, two community sites that are both within the Lycos Network, came in at Nos. 4 and 5 on the list.
    Only three e-commerce sites ranked among the top 50 most visible sites on the web for the month of December, according to Word of Net—Amazon at No. 9, eBay at No. 36 and CDNow at No. 45.
   Word of Net claims that the sites it ranks as most visible are those that are easiest to find by web users. The visibility index takes into account a series of factors to determine a web site’s overall visibility on the web, including online advertisements, keywords, directory listings and "inbound links"—that is, how many other sites link to any one site.
   "The big community sites are high up on the list because they often have many links between the various ‘properties,’" says Allan Rentz, Word of Net’s director of marketing.
   "Additionally, their size alone provides a good deal of visibility."
   It appears that sites that encourage community and human interaction, even when it does not involve hosting web sites, do well in Word of Net’s rankings.
    For instance, About.com, the human guide-based web network, emerges as the third most-visible portal behind Aol.com and Yahoo.com at No. 7, ahead of rival MSN, which is No. 10 ranked by visibility even as it appears at No. 3 on traffic-based charts.
   About ranks far ahead of Lycos and Excite according to Word of Net methodology.
   And Epinions.com, a site that gathers consumer opinions on a wide variety of products, comes in at No. 14 on the December visibility chart.
    Word of Net commissioned a study from the University of Southern California last year that claimed that the sort of online "visibility" measured by the visibility index drives the vast majority of web traffic—some 87 percent of it. Advertising spending alone was found by this same study to drive only 44 percent of web traffic.

-Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media.

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