October Audience Ratings, from Media Metrix, Inc.
Total U.S. Internet population for October estimated at 62 million people. "Audience reach" is the number of people who visited a site once during the month.

1. America Online – With 14 million subscribers on its proprietary service and another 2 million for CompuServe, AOL has the biggest audience in cyberspace. In addition to its dial-up service, AOL owns two heavily trafficked Web sites: AOL.com, the portal through which AOL subscribers pass on their way to the Web, and ICQ.com, home of the instant messaging software. AOL also has announced plans to buy Netscape Communications Corp., which turned its Web site (www.netscape.com) into a portal with this year.

Reach: Excluding Netscape, AOL's Web properties drew 48 percent of the Web audience, or 29 million people. If Netscape's October Web traffic were folded into AOL's Web traffic, its combined reach would jump to more than 60 percent. AOL's Web reach has been flat since April.

Financials: AOL reported $858 million in revenue for the most recent quarter, with net income of $108 million. Advertising and electronic commerce accounted for only 16.7% of its revenue, while subscriber fees remain the main money source.

Vision: CEO Steve Case: "We are every day waking up saying, 'How can we build a better service for our members; how can we build a better company to work for, to invest in; how can we participate in building a medium that we can be proud of?"

2. Yahoo! – Yahoo has built one of the Internet's best-known brands based on the human-edited directory of Web sites launched by two Stanford University graduate students in 1994. It has expanded aggressively overseas and also built regional directories throughout the U.S.; all of its Web sites carry the same Yahoo name.

Reach: Yahoo's sites drew visits from 48 percent of U.S. Web users in October, or 29 million people. The percentage was down from April, when Yahoo had an audience reach of 51 percent. Yahoo executives believe the number of pages viewed are equally important; they reported that Yahoo visitors looked at 144 million pages, on average, each day in September.

Financials: Yahoo reported revenue of $53 million in the most recent quarter, with net income of $16 million.

Vision: CEO Timothy Koogle: "Yahoo has built a strong brand on doing the following-being a very open, comprehensive place that users worldwide can go to find and get connected to anything or anybody. It's a specific mission. If you magically polled our users worldwide, which are in the tens of millions, they would probably all tell you that's what Yahoo's about."

3. The Microsoft Network – Software giant Microsoft Corp. has one of the faster growing collection of Web sites, which it is trying to unify under the portal, MSN.com, while keeping Microsoft.com for its software business. The portal, however, has one of the weaker and more confusing designs of all the portals. Unlike Yahoo, Microsoft has given each of its deep vertical Web sites their own brand names: Expedia for travel, MoneyCentral for investing, CarPoint for auto sales, HomeAdvisor for real estate, and Sidewalk for shopping and local content, and MSNBC.com for news.

Reach: Microsoft's sites combined reached 46 percent of the Web audience in October, or more than 28 million people. But while some of the other portals' reach stayed flat, the reach of Microsoft's Internet properties jumped more than 50 percent this year.

Financials: Microsoft does not break out its Internet operations in its financial reports, but they are drop in a very big bucket. The company reported revenue of $3.9 billion for the most recent quarter, with net income of $1.68 billion.

Vision: It may be changing since the leader of Microsoft's Internet operations, Pete Higgins, announced last month he was taking a six-month leave of absence. The mission to date has been to create utilitarian sites that help consumers take actions, like buying cars or picking a movie.

4. The Lycos Network – Like many portals, Lycos started as a search engine three years ago and later branched out into other services. Using its rising stock market valuation, Lycos, Inc. went on a spending spree this year to boost its reach by acquiring other Web sites and stringing them together into a network. It bought Angelfire and Tripod, two sites that let people build their own home pages; Wired Digital, owner of the HotBot search engine, HotWired news and WebMonkey site for Web developers; and the satirical Webzine Suck. Lycos also bought MailCity, a free e-mail site; and Guestworld, which allows sites to record visitor comments.

Reach: The Lycos Network had a reach of 44 percent, or nearly 28 million people. The lion's share of the traffic comes from lycos.com, which had a standalone reach of 22 percent, compared to 15 and 16 percent each for Angelfire and Tripod. The Lycos Network's overall reach rose the most dramatically this year, from about 14 percent before the acquisitions early in the year. While its "reach" is relatively high, its average daily page views-36 million a day in October – are much lower than Yahoo's.

Financials: Lycos reported $24 million in revenue for the most recent quarter, with a net loss of $2.6 million.

Vision: CEO Robert J. Davis: "Community has been the driving force behind the growth we've seen at Lycos. .It's about people interacting with other people."

5. Disney/Infoseek's GO Network – The Walt Disney Co. took a 43 stake in Infoseek this year, and together they designed a new portal that will officially launch in January at www.go.com. GO Network (available in preview version now) aims to unify all the Web properties that Disney owns or has a stake in, including ESPN.com, Disney.com, Family.com, MrShowbiz.com and ABCnews.com. The portal at Infoseek.com will remain a separate Web guide, athough it will be linked to portions of GO.

Reach: Infoseek's reach for October was nearly 22 percent, while Disney's other properties totaled 23 percent. An unduplicated reach figure-the number of people Infoseek and Disney joint reached-was not available. Infoseek's average daily page views in September were 21 million, while ESPN.com and ABCNews.com together had 17 million in page views.

Financials: Infoseek reported $19 million in revenue for the most recent quarter, and a net loss of $2.6 million. Disney does not separate its Internet properties in financial reports. However, in seeking regulatory approval for the Infoseek transaction, Disney said ABCnews.com earned only $7 million in during the nine months ending in June, while spending nearly $19 million on operating expenses, for a loss of $2.8 million. For the same period, ESPN.com earned $14.5 million in revenue, not enough to cover its $18 million in operating expenses. Disney reported no figures for its family sites.

Vision: Infoseek CEO Harry Motro: "Our vision is to combine leading consumer brands with a network of interactive services so you really change people's lives, and how they use the web, and how they generally get what they want done. Our vision is beyond just the Internet. We view our customers as customers on TV, radio, cruise ships, stores and anywhere. "

6. Excite – Excite, like Yahoo, believes in a highly unified site with only one brand. It, too, started as a humble search engine originally called Architect Software. It went on an 18-month purchase binge in which it traded shares worth more than $200 million for nine companies, including competing Web guides Web Crawler and the Magellan Internet Guide. More recently, Excite bought MatchLogic, whose database software the company said will help it raise advertising rates by targeting ads more precisely to the viewing preferences of visitors.

Reach: Excite had audience reach of 30 percent in October, or nearly 19 million visitors. Its audience share has remained within two or three points since April, when it was 33 percent.

Financials: Excite reported revenue of $44 million in the most recent quarter, with a net loss of $6.8 million after all charges.

Vision: Founder and Senior VP Joe Kraus: "Our strategy is a belief that American consumers want two things: convenience and brand. Our strategy is to offer the most convenient experience on the front page of Excite, with huge depth behind that page, and then aggregate all of that into one brand identity.