Data On Fastest Growing Sites Yields Surprising Insights via @sejournal, @martinibuster

The competitive research tool similarweb released its Digital 100 list of sites with the largest growth in traffic, providing insights into what’s driving traffic growth across various informational and shopping categories.

Gig Economy Shows Strong Growth

The website with the most growth is JustAnswer.com, a gig economy platform that enables consumers to consult with experts such as doctors, home repair experts, lawyers, and veterinarians. JustAnswer.com experienced 81% year over year visitor growth, soaring from 11.6M monthly unique visitors (MUVs) in 2023 to a whopping 21M visitors.

JustAnswer.com’s performance highlights the popularity of the gig economy with consumers and freelancers who are able to share their expertise without the overhead of a storefront and traditional advertising

ChatGPT Shows Strong Growth

ChatGPT kept on growing in 2024, surging by 33% from 28.8M monthly unique visitors (MUVs) to 38.2M MUVs.

News Site Category Experiences Growth

Fifty percent of the top ten fastest growing sites were in the news industry. Growth in traffic to news sites increased year over year with the recent American election driving a large part of that growth.

The surprise winner in the news category is Substack, the news outlet for trustworthy independent news content. Substack is a platform that allows journalists and other writers to monetize their talent, keeping 90% of their earnings. Substack experienced 37% growth in traffic, increasing from 13.8M visitors in 2023 to 18.9M visitors in 2024.

Similarweb shared:

“Unsurprisingly, in an election year, news sites saw high growth. The real surprise? Half of the top 10 fastestgrowing US sites were news-focused. Like Newsweek (up 71%). But among the traditional sites is Substack — our
overall Digital Winner. Its success suggests consumers are increasingly seeking independent news sources.”

Apparel Websites

Similarweb’s statistics for apparel websites shows where consumer trends are and also has surprises related to the kinds of top level domains consumers feel comfortable with.

Similarweb’s insight on this category:

“The sportswear and sneakers craze shows no signs of slowing down. JD Sports emerged as the overall Digital Winner in the category — 150% growth in monthly active app users and 35% in web visitors. Additionally, the growth of Discount Divas and Depop reflects the rising demand for sustainability and affordability in fashion.”

Biggest Growth In Apparel Category

Peppermayo.com experienced the strongest growth for apparel websites, rising from 416% from 58.8K monthly unique visitors in 2023 to 303.7K in 2024. T

Most Actual Traffic

The apparel website with the most actual traffic is Quince.com, a fashion company that offers fashionable clothing for men and women at reasonable prices. They’re not fast fashion but focus on every day staples as well as clothes that an adult man or woman might wear on a night out or on vacation. Judging by the images posted on their site it looks like they’re focusing on a relatively underserved segment of the clothing consumer from the thirties on up and they’ve certainly cracked it because their monthly unique visitors jumped 176% from 2.06 million monthly unique visitors to 5.68 million visitors. How did they do it? Something that may be contributing to their success is that Quince encourages their customers to leave reviews with images, which in turn makes it easier to see how the clothes fit on real people and read the reviews on the clothes. The discounts offered to repeat customers and their liberal return and exchange policies encourage a positive user experience, a strategy that made a company like Zappos wildly popular in the early 2000s.

Something else that’s interesting about the apparel website rankings is that there are two .US top level domains, one .SHOP generic top level domain, and one site with a hyphen in it, showing how consumers are okay with domains that aren’t dot coms and that a hyphenated domain name can still work fine.

Here are the top ten by year over year growth (2023 to 2024) for apparel websites:

Serving Niche Product Consumers

Other notable rankings are in consumer electronics which shows the value of offering useful products at a reasonable price point to value ratio like SharkNinja vacuums. SharkNinja.com improved their traffic by 187%, going from 98.9K to 283.7K monthly unique visitors. SharkNinja offers popular and well reviewed products.

The other notable consumer electronics brand making big strides in traffic is Yotoplay.com, which offers a unique product that may be higher cost but appeals to parental values. The screen-free children’s audio player electronics company Yotoplay.com increased traffic by 130%, going from 199K monthly unique visitors in 2023 to 457.6K monthly visitors in 2024. Their secret is offering parents a screen-free way to engage young children with stories, music and learning with a device that’s easy for little kids to use together with their parents.

Both of these sites show how profitable it can be to focus on a narrow niche, understand your customers and deliver a quality product and experience.

Read similarweb’s post about their data:

Digital 100 – The Official 100 Fastest-Growing Companies Online in 2024

Read the PDF version of the report that contains detailed data.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Gearstd