Web site traffic is power-law distributed. The top ten accounts for a huge slice of the attention pie. Here is the top ten from Alexia’s Top Global 500.

• yahoo.com
• msn.com
• google.com
• passport.net
• yahoo.co.jp
• sina.com.cn
• baidu.com
• ebay.com
• microsoft.com
• sohu.com

Lots of food for thought in that very small list. AOL? The Asian portals! Notice how many of those sites are in the same business, i.e. portal.

These lists are the shopping channel for investment bankers. No surprise that Google owns a piece of Baidu. I predict further condensation.

When thinking about the identity problem it’s important to note that Microsoft has market shaping power not just on the client side, but also on the server side.