Compete.com, one of the numerous sites trying to measure user behavior on the web, has released an interesting list that they call the “Compete Attention 200,” or the top 200 sites for US web surfers in terms of attention spent there, which is a measure of how much time people spend on the top 1 million websites.

It makes a lot of sense to me, especially as attention has long been one of the two most important metrics that we use internally to measure what our users are doing. We track user-minutes spent online and non-idle for a rolling 24 hour period, and I know when I’m online, I look at that number at least once an hour. (The other metric is revenue, which has a strong correlation to attention for us.)

The top 10 are reasonably predictable:

  1. myspace.com
  2. yahoo.com
  3. msn.com
  4. ebay.com
  5. google.com
  6. aol.com
  7. pogo.com
  8. facebook.com
  9. amazon.com
  10. craigslist.com

A couple caught my eye below that.

#18 - neopets.com - Often imitated, but very clearly, not yet successfully duplicated.

#19 - adultfriendfinder.com - I knew it was big, but I didn’t know it was that big.

#21 - runescape.com - The juggernaught does not stop.