Despite its well-publicized slow start on the web,  Wal-Mart is now one of the web's top properties.
   Walmart.com has gone through three major redesigns in four years, including one that involved shutting the site down for just about the entire month of October 2000. The Arkansas-based retail giant did not reopen its site for business until Oct. 31.
   And yet by year’s end Walmart.com would make its debut on the Media Metrix list of top 50 web properties, appearing at No. 41 for the month of December according to data just released.
   In so doing Walmart.com leaped well ahead of Toysrus.com, despite the toy vendor’s high-profile position on the Amazon.com web site. And traffic to Walmart.com for December was within 4 percent of traffic to long-established bricks-and-clicks retailer Barnesandnoble.com, a position that could easily flip-flop once web purchasers turn away from gifts and back towards mundane spending in the early part of 2001.
   Walmart.com’s emergence from almost nowhere as an e-tail leader should put to rest once and for all an idea once held as internet gospel—the idea of the "first-mover advantage."
   In retrospect this appears to be one of the most foolish of the many foolish ideas bandied about during the web’s first few years.
    Wal-Mart was after all a company that was just about the last mover, with all its hesitations and redesigns.
   But now that the web is reaching mainstream America, a company as big as Wal-Mart can go online and get established with impressive speed. Contrary to the beliefs of early dot.com dreamers who thought the new technology would wipe out decades of work other companies did at establishing brands, it seems the internet may far more often function to reinforce the power of existing brands. Walmart.com may yet climb further up the charts as 2001 progresses.
    In other notable movement on the chart in December, Amazon had a predictably strong month, moving up to No. 7 from No. 11 with a 22 percent gain in traffic over its average traffic from the previous three months.
   And auction site eBay also benefited from Christmas spending, cracking the top 10 with a 26.2 percent increase in traffic over its average from the previous three months.
   Another December feature--winter storms--sent traffic soaring at The Weather Channel's web site, moving it up to No. 19 from No. 27 with an almost 50 percent increase in visitors compared to the average from the previous three months.
   But the month's largest move up the chart had no particular connection to the season at all, as the stripped-down search engine Google went from No. 50 in November to No. 38, with a 19.1 percent increase in traffic compared to its previous three months' average.

-Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media.

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