Woman's personal site tops in growth 

By Jeremy Schlosberg

     This week’s list of Media Metrix gainers, compiled for the week ending Aug. 29, illustrates at once the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of the web.
      To begin with, the week’s leading gainer was Jennicam.org. Jennicam.org turns out to be a compellingly designed but devastatingly mundane personal web site of one Jennifer K. Ringley, an enterprising 22-year-old in Washington, D.C. The site features a continually updated view of her hanging out in her apartment. It is unclear what she did to spike her audience, but the number of visitors grew by 183 percent over the previous week.
     Second in growth for the week ending Aug. 29 was Ptd.net, with 148 percent growth over the prior week. Ptd.net is a web address for Planet Direct, a highly personalizable portal service that is a wholly owned subsidiary of CMGI, a major internet services company.
     But as it turns out, the No. 11 site on this list—Planetdirect.com—is another address for the very same web site. And so the numbers should really be combined, which would put Planet Direct at No. 5, with something in the neighborhood of 94 percent growth week to week. Less important than the ultimate number is the fact that Media Metrix did not catch this—which itself is less a slam at Media Metrix than another indication of how tricky it can be to measure things on the web.
   As usual, the most interesting stories are further down on the list. Most notable was the recurring presence of Alladvantage.com. Alladvantage.com—a site that offers users payment for hours spent surfing the web--was the No. 3 gainer the previous week; in two weeks now the California-based site has seen its visitors grow by well over 200 percent.
     Another interesting player on the list is Salon.com, the web-based magazine-cum-community site. Perhaps a result of a new co-branded site agreement with Lycos, the widely regarded but still second-tier Salon saw a one-week spike of 61.7 percent.
   In Media Metrix’s weekly top 10 web site list, the only shift from the previous week came from LookSmart, the up-and-coming portal, which inched one more notch up to No. 7, ahead of the so-called Realsite Portfolio, which is how Media Metrix refers to the Real Networks’ web sites.