Does Web Site Popularity Reflect Quality?

• Posted: Tuesday, October 17, 2006
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• Author: pradhana
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• Filed under: Internet Advertising, Market Survey, Online Advertising

Gainers and losers.

WebMD came out on the top of the "Top 10 Health, Fitness and Nutrition Destinations" list for the week ending September 10, 2006, as tracked by Nielsen//NetRatings.

Weight Watchers, the diet site, was in the No. 2 position. In the list of the "Top 10 Health Advertisers" for the same week, Nielsen//NetRatings found that the diet companies Weight Watchers, NutriSystems and eDiets came in first, second and fifth, respectively.

All this brings up a question, of interest not just in the health and diet categories, but all businesses online: Are the most popular sites the best sites?

According to the "Rating the Diets" report from Consumer Reports, WebWatch and the Health Improvement Institute (HII), while many consumers are logging on to the Web for weight-loss advice, some diet sites are more helpful than others.

Now that may not be much of a surprise — but the fact that the Consumer Reports and HII raters found that the popularity (how often they were visited) of the Web sites did not correspond to the quality of the sites is. In fact, the report states that more than a quarter of the Web's 20 top diet information sites — as ranked, again, by Nielsen//NetRatings — lack basic information about information sources, the degree to which advertising may or may not influence content on their site and the credentials or potential biases of their authors.

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