The market share of U.S. visits to a custom category of Question and Answer websites has increased 118 percent for the week ending Mar. 15, 2008, compared to the same week in 2007, Hitwise reported today. Over the past two years, U.S. visits to this category have increased 889 percent comparing Feb. 2008 versus Feb. 2006.

The most visited website within the Questions and Answers category last week was Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com), which received 74.05 percent of the market share of U.S. visits. Wiki.Answers.com was the second most visited website receiving 18.35 percent of visits, followed by Answerbag.com, which received 4.42 percent of visits. WikiAnswers, launched in June 2007 has seen its U.S. visits increase 125 percent comparing the week ending Jun. 9, 2007 versus Mar. 15, 2008.

Top 5 Question and Answer Websites ranked by Market Share of U.S. Visits
Rank	Name	Domain	U.S. Visits w/e Mar. 15, 2008	U.S. Visits w/e Mar. 17, 2007	Percent Change
1	Yahoo! Answers	answers.yahoo.com	74.05%	94.25%	-21%
2	WikiAnswers	wiki.answers.com	18.35%	NA	NA
3	Answerbag	www.answerbag.com	4.51%	2.46%	83%
4	Ask MetaFilter	ask.metafilter.com	1.80%	1.88%	-4%
5	Askville	www.askville.com	0.85%	0.20%	316%
Note - the Hitwise data is based on a custom category of eight of the leading Answer websites ranked by U.S. market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context. The market share of visits percentage does not include traffic for all sub-domains of certain websites which could be reported on separately.
Source: Hitwise

Labels: Yahoo