The Alexa Ranking is a well-known ranking mechanism, which sorts websites according to their popularity. Popularity in this case means the average of daily visitors as well as their page views.
“Don’t be evil” is Google’s unofficial motto. Google comes in first and second among Germany’s most popular sites. Hurray!
Anyways, I always thought it was really interesting to see which websites are popular at the time and in particular which ones people from different countries like to check out.
Of course many of the big names re-appear for a lot of the countries, but it’s the differences and peculiarities I would like to point out here.
.de is the TLD for websites from Germany by the way. I give you the top 10:
1. google.de
2. google.com
3. facebook.com
4. youtube.com
5. ebay.de
6. wikipedia.org
7. amazon.de
8. yahoo.com
9. spiegel.de
10. web.de
Not much of a surprise for the top websites here. What is different from English-speaking countries, though , is that Google appears twice, in its German as well as in its English version (it’s similar for France, Italy and many other countries).
Facebook, YouTube, eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon are all well-known names as well and they each have their respective German releases, so not much difference here either. Yahoo! appears later than in the US or UK and never had as large of a market share as in those two countries.
Then it gets interesting: spiegel.de comes in 9th and web.de 10th. Der Spiegel is one of Germany’s best-selling news magazines and appears weekly. Spiegel simply means mirror. Their website is a comprehensive collection of daily news and has been very successful over the years. Web.de is Germany’s own Yahoo! so to speak. It is an Internet portal which has been around since the mid-90s and offers a range of online services such as email accounts, news, DSL and the like.
11 to 20 look like this:
11. twitter.com
12. bild.de
13. gmx.net
14. xing.com
15. blogger.com
16. studiverzeichnis.com
17. t-online.de
18. leo.org
19. live.com
20. wer-kennt-wen.de
Twitter, Blogger (Google’s blogging service) and Live (Microsoft’s online services) again are international names that re-appear in most countries.
“Bild” Website – yepp, it’s that bad
bild.de is the website of BILD, Germany’s most circulated newspaper and worst yellow press at the same time. Bild simply means picture and that is what their newspaper and website looks like – a lot of pictures, not a lot of text. To compensate for the lack of text, they do blow up the headlines to a ridiculous size, though. And it works. If you thought most German newspapers were all serious and only dealing with business, this one might come as a shock to you ;-)
Xing, studiverzeichnis.de and wer-kennt-wen.de are all social networking sites with a different focus: Xing contains business profiles, studiverzeichnis.de is for college students and wer-kennt-wen is a fairly general service where you can find out who is connected to whom etc.
The one for college students (abbreviated StudiVZ) is actually more important than it appears here, because two other sites, one for high school students and one open to everyone, belong to the same network. Combined they make up Germany’s biggest social network, with more users than facebook. It is still a facebook clone, just with fewer features.
T-Online is Germany largest internet service provider. Now they offer all kinds of other online services as well. GMX is another email and online service provider.
“LEO” website
leo.org is one of my favorites here, because it has morphed from a small university project into a website that most people know. LEO started off as a German-English dictionary, but now contains multiple languages. They started to put ads on the site a while back, but it still looks pretty clean and simple and hasn’t turned into one of those online mega-sites that try to do everything. I think that’s why it’s so popular.
So, those are the top 20. I browsed the rest of them for you, there are 100 sites listed: most of them are more news portals, online services, social software sites and porn.
Two more that I thought were interesting:
33. Heise Online
Is pretty good portal related to IT and online news with a large community in its bulletin boards. If you search for anything tech-related in German, you’re likely to come across this page.
38. Kicker.de
Kicker is a traditional German soccer magazine, so it ranks fairly high here. Kicker as in ‘kick the ball’.
I checked really hard, but unfortunately I’m not among the top 100 sites yet, damn it. Happy browsing to you!
for an email ending ——-@gmt.?
I think you’re talking about GMX? It’s a very popular and free German web mail service, which has been around since the early internet, similar to Hotmail for example. They provide you with some free web space and are not directly associated with any internet service provider.
List of 1000 most Popular german Websites:
http://www.itlantik.de/top-1000-deutsche-de-domains-webseiten
Thanks for this updated list, Karl! It’s quite surprising how little actually has actually changed within more than three years (which is a long time on the web…) when you look at it.
I still prefer listing all top level domains instead of just the .de ones, though, – de.wikipedia.org or the German version of facebook.com surely are relevant to that list as well.
bild.de is the website of BILD, Germany’s most circulated newspaper and worst yellow press at the same time. Bild simply means picture and that is what their newspaper and website looks like