Metafilter Sources

As part of my ongoing interest in Metafilter statistics, I was curious to see which sites Metafilter users link to the most.

From a complete dump of Metafilter’s front-page post database back to July 1999 (thanks, Matt!), I extracted the unique domains linked from each entry and added them all up.

The Top 50 results are below, proving that the NewsFilter moniker isn’t too far off. (Or you can view the entire list.)


Top 50 Metafilter Sources (View All…)

  1. metafilter.com (1457)
  2. news.bbc.co.uk (1218)
  3. nytimes.com (1136)
  4. cnn.com (979)
  5. dailynews.yahoo.com (828)
  6. washingtonpost.com (815)
  7. guardian.co.uk (481)
  8. story.news.yahoo.com (471)
  9. salon.com (458)
  10. msnbc.com (455)
  11. amazon.com (441)
  12. wired.com (394)
  13. geocities.com (391)
  14. sfgate.com (315)
  15. us.imdb.com (273)
  16. google.com (267)
  17. abcnews.go.com (244)
  18. boston.com (239)
  19. pbs.org (234)
  20. bbc.co.uk (224)
  21. slate.msn.com (189)
  22. latimes.com (185)
  23. newscientist.com (175)
  24. theregister.co.uk (162)
  25. foxnews.com (155)
  26. reuters.com (140)
  27. time.com (139)
  28. usatoday.com (135)
  29. cbc.ca (132)
  30. news.cnet.com (129)
  31. members.aol.com (124)
  32. theatlantic.com (119)
  33. villagevoice.com (117)
  34. newyorker.com (115)
  35. cgi.ebay.com (113)
  36. apple.com (111)
  37. slashdot.org (110)
  38. npr.org (109)
  39. ananova.com (106)
  40. whitehouse.gov (103)
  41. espn.go.com (102)
  42. smh.com.au (101)
  43. angelfire.com (99)
  44. zdnet.com (97)
  45. nandotimes.com (96)
  46. imdb.com (93)
  47. observer.co.uk (92)
  48. microsoft.com (90)
  49. memory.loc.gov (90)
  50. iht.com (85)

Comments

    I’d be interested to see the intersection of the big list with a list of blogs (from blo.gs or technorati or something?). Ctrl-Fing around revealed kottke (63), waxy.org (24), sylloge.com (16) …

    Also, if you plotted the distribution on a graph, it’d seem less newsfilter-y, I think: the 1s start at position 8,333, but there are 27,173 entries.

    what hte hell good is that chart as a png? give me a zoomable dataset so i can see some more information beyond “fuck, it drops off real fast”

    i can’t imagine keeping a record of every MetaFilter post since 1999 (34,831 posts as of now? *whew*)

    it’s reassuring to see that it’s the BBC who’s getting the most hits out of all the other news sites, tho 😉 …thanks for the stats.

    This makes sense, even without ‘newsfilter’

    Think about it. What websites are constantly updated, on a daily basis, with things worthy of notice by a community weblog?

    News sites, news sites, and umm… news sites.

    Random flash movies, strange musical endeavors, weird new blogs, all tend to have their own domains.

    News articles, inherently, show up on news sites, which are posting them consistently.

    In other words, 10 flash movies, will come from 10 domains.

    But 10 incredible, world stoppingly important news stories, will all be linked from CNN.

    Newsfilter nothin’. It’s just the nature of the Internet.

    Interesting stuff. As a Brit, I’m quite proud to have two of our news sources up in the top 10, even more that the BBC is no. 1(ish). What does this mean in terms of Metafilter’s readership’s nationalities or political leaning? (esp. since the Guardian is a leftie, even in the UK…)

    Are you just going to ignore the fact that the number one link is to metafilter itself? Power law curves are interesting, and all, but the real story is metafilter users’ self-importance.

    It has less to do with self-importance, and more to do with referring back to older Metafilter threads. Whenever someone updates an older story or refers to a past thread, it’s a link to Metafilter.

    BBC is prolly one of the highest through sheer laziness – default Firefox install has “Latest Headlines” RSS feed that is BBC news exclusively, and if you can find it there, why look anywhere else?

    I have always thought that social media companies like twitter, facebook are being linked most due to their badges and follow craze. This list looks little too different from my expectation.

Comments are closed.