Compete: Social Networks Grow Audience As Netflix, Daily Deal Sites Lose Traffic

Compete.com, a Kantar Media company, today released its ranking of the top 250 websites for August 2011 (click here for the top 50).

We can’t repeat this often enough, but take these stats with a grain of salt when it comes to accuracy.

We’ve looked at the top 250 all the same, because the list tends to depict trends also visible with other analytics service providers, such as comScore and Google Trends.

According to Compete.com data, which is pulled from its PRO Enterprise edition, notable traffic increases registered in August 2011 were to Facebook.com, Bing.com, YouTube.com, Amazon.com and eHow.com (all up roughly 4 percent month-over-month) and Twitter.com (up about 12.7 percent month-over-month and over 27.5 percent compared to August 2010).

Microsoft also appears to be on fire: traffic data for Bing.com, Live.com, MSN.com and Microsoft.com suggest steady traffic increases for all. Another winner: Weather.com, with traffic up 16.4 percent month-over-month and 34 percent compared to August 2010.

Some of the traffic losers include blogging platforms such as Blogspot.com (down 5.5 percent compared to July 2011) and WordPress.com (down 2.7 percent) as well as information websites such as YellowPages.com (down 7.8 percent) and iMDB.com (down 6.6 percent).

Other notable ‘losers’: Netflix.com (down over 4 percent compared to July 2011) and daily deal sites Groupon.com and LivingSocial.com, which are down 28.6 percent and 4.25 percent month-over-month, respectively.

It’s worth noting that all of the websites who’ve seen their traffic decrease in August 2011, according to Compete, are up (some significantly) year-over-year – with the exception of iMDB.com.

Honorable mention goes to Myspace.com, which is down over 55 percent compared to August 2010.