The Top 20 Most Engaged Sites on the Internet

A few weeks ago we launched a new feature within Quantcast Measure: the Engagement Report. As with all audience data and insights available from Quantcast Measure, we built the Engagement Report to help publishers better understand their audience and the health of their business.
Unfortunately, top-line traffic numbers don’t tell the whole story.
In fact, focusing on one metric—no matter what it is—is far too narrow a field of vision to accurately represent performance and can lead you to the wrong conclusions.

Let me explain.
What you really want to know is if your traffic is engaged with your site and content, as that’s one of the ultimate KPIs of a valuable audience. The Engagement Report gives you this information. It works by determining whether someone is a “Passer-by”, “Regular”, or “Fanatic” based on directly measured data from Quantified publishers. Here’s how we define each one:

• Passers-by – Users who visit only once in a given month.
• Regulars – Users who visit more than once but less than 30 times in a given month.
• Fanatics – Users who visit 30 or more times in a given month.

Some of the more savvy publishers have been looking at KPIs beyond pageviews for quite some time, but tons of people are still making important decisions on high-level traffic metrics. If you’re one of those folks, this may be a fundamental shift in how you evaluate your site’s health, make decisions, grow your audience, and monetize your property. For example:

• How much more could you negotiate from an advertising partner if you could prove that your audience loves your site so much that a large portion of them come back 40 or 50 times every month?
• How would your opinion of your property’s health shift if you found out that your traffic numbers were high, but very few came back to consume your content for a second time?
• And how would that same knowledge affect your editorial strategy?

The best part is that a shift from pageviews towards more meaningful metrics doesn’t require a massive technical change. It’s available within Quantcast Measure, and tens of thousands of publishers already have access to it. The Engagement Report helps publishers support ad sales efforts, optimize editorial content, or just have meaningful metrics to benchmark against.
On Quantcast Measure’s Top Sites list, you can see the ranking of the most popular sites. Since we built the Engagement Report, this is the first time we’ve been able to show audience data around engagement.
The top 20 most engaged Quantified sites this month
We thought it would be fun to look at the most engaged Quantified sites on the web, and pick out some of the more interesting examples. It’s important to note that these sites are not the highest by traffic, but that they have the highest percentage of Fanatics that make up their audience. We examined what the site is, what type of content they published, and what about their site makes their audience keep coming back so frequently. You can see the full list of the top 20 at the bottom of this post.
Here are the 4 most interesting examples:

TheJigsawPuzzles.com
Fanatics percentage: 16.8%

We would never have guessed that this site’s audience had the highest percentage of Fanatics out of all Quantified publishers! TheJigsawPuzzles.com offers thousands of free jigsaw puzzles in a flash player setting, a-la early-2000’s flash games (that were all the rage). I spent some time on the site and played around a bit—I have to admit, it is addicting! While not the largest audience on the web at 1.2 million global uniques, it’s not the smallest either. What’s also interesting is that TheJigsawPuzzles.com’s audience skews highly to the 55+ crowd. That’s not super surprising, though—retirees love their puzzles.

Wuxiaworld.com
Fanatics percentage: 13.4%

Reaching nearly 900k people each month, Wuxiaworld describes themselves as a Chinese-to-English novel translation platform. Wuxia is genre of Chinese martial arts fiction, and it’s very popular in Chinese-speaking communities around the world. Wuxiaworld seems to cater to English speakers only (or those that prefer to read in English).
Since their content consists primarily of novels, it completely makes sense that a large percentage of their audience visits on a frequent basis. In fact if you dig into the data available in the Engagement Report, you’ll find that each person visits Wuxiaworld over 40 times a month. We like to think that if we could attach analytics to a physical book somehow (pinging the Quantcast Measure product team!), the data would look a lot like Wuxiaworld’s.

Swagbucks.com
Fanatics percentage: 13.3%

It’s no surprise Swagbucks has such a large portion of their audience that keeps coming back over 30 times each month—who doesn’t love a deal?! Swagbucks is an online portal that gives consumers rewards for shopping at major retailers, answering surveys, and other online activities. They claim to have already paid out $180,559,610 in cash and free gift cards.
So what are all these Swagbucks Fanatics getting their cash back on? It looks like baby products and soaps/shampoos/deodorants.

What are they spending all their Swagbucks rewards on? The extra rewards are probably all going towards student loans, since Swagbucks users are 5.8X more likely to be in-market for student loans than the average US Internet user. All of these insights are also available in Quantcast Measure.

StackOverflow.com
Fanatics percentage: 5.5%

Stack Overflow reaches over 35 million people monthly, which makes a Fanatics percentage of 5.5% a very impressive figure. Stack Overflow is a question and answer platform on wide range of computer programming topics. They call themselves “The world’s largest programming community”. That’s probably true, as every single software engineer I know has spent a significant amount of time on Stack Overflow. It’s no surprise, then, that 5.5% of their total audience comes back over 30 times every month.
 
The full list
The full list of this last month’s most engaged Quantified sites:

Where this data came from
The Top 20 Most Engaged Sites list is based on the last 30 days of engagement data from public Quantified sites above 100,000 monthly unique pageviews. Properties that are not Quantified (do not have the Quantcast Measure tag installed), properties that are under 100,000 monthly uniques, or properties that have their Quantcast Measure profiles hidden (not publicly viewable) were not included in our rankings.
 
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