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I was asked what the biggest traffic sites are in eLearning that were not vendor specific sites. This was from a marketer trying to reach eLearning professionals.

My quick answer was that Jane Hart’s site, eLearning Learning and The eLearning Guild would be among the top. But I really didn’t/don’t know the answer. I did promise I’d do some research and post what I found.

I used Compete.com. It’s definitely not accurate as it way under reports traffic for eLearning Learning. However, after reading various sources that compared different traffic estimation tools, I was convinced that it was generally a decent indicator.

Thanks to Harold Jarche and Susan Lewis (via twitter) and Cathy Moore and Dennis Wilen (via Facebook) with help on this. Cathy pointed me to questions about Alexa (Wikipedia article). Susan pointed out that none of this accounts for RSS subscription. Of course, it also doesn’t count email subscribers or twitter. So, yes … This is only rough estimating.

Top Sites

Using it, I plugged a whole bunch of different sites into it and produced the following graph of some of what I perceive to be the top sites.

After doing this, I realized that eLearn Magazine don’t seem to have that much web traffic. In fact, according to Compete, eLearning Technology (this blog) and Stephen Downes’ Site come in higher that eLearn Magazine. Here’s a chart with those sources included:

Of course, Stephen covers more than eLearning. And there are sites like ASTD that go well outside the world of eLearning.

So to be clear, things I excluded:

• Vendor specific sites, e.g., Skillsoft
• Sites focused on broader topics like HR, Talent Management, Training, etc., e.g., ASTD (which has good traffic), CLO Media (which doesn’t seem to have good traffic volume)
• Sites that I can’t get accurate numbers separate from the base site. Learning Circuits is part of ASTD.

Other Sites I tried but came out lower:

• Brandon Hall
• Learning Solutions Magazine
• Training Magazine Network
• TrainingIndustry.com
• ELearning! Magazine
• Masie.com

It’s a little bit of a surprise to me some of the traffic numbers.

Is this a surprise to you?

What sites did I miss here?