The 2009 Mequoda Hotlist

The 2009 Mequoda Hotlist is our annual listing of the fastest growing Mequoda System Publishers in America.  The multi-media publishers in the Mequoda Hotlist are used by the Mequoda Research Team to maintain the Mequoda System Best Practices for Successful Online Publishing & Marketing and are the base line for virtually all the content produced for Mequoda Daily, Mequoda Webinars, Mequoda Pro Seminars on Demand and all live Mequoda Summits and Workshops.

For more on how this list was compiled, see below.

Nominee July 08 UVs July 09 UVs Yearly Change
20,040 193,473 865.43%
Ragan 12,422 49,547 298.86%
Real Simple 720,185 2,001,634 177.93%
Johns Hopkins Health Alerts 95,794 257,073 168.36%
Ceramic Arts Daily 11,309 27,402 142.30%
Huffington Post 2,945,065 6,875,765 133.47%
HRHero.com 13,183 30,486 131.25%
Reptile Channel 16,785 38,526 129.53%
HubSpot 63,618 144,205 126.67%
Vanity Fair 442,206 896,359 102.70%
TMZ 4,435,315 8,128,837 83.28%
Advertising Age 337,233 596,988 77.03%
Discover 206,079 364,104 76.68%
Runner’s World 352,790 616,540 74.76%
Premier Guitar 24,360 42,387 74.00%
Men’s Health 754,523 1,307,346 73.27%
Fodors 300,333 505,188 68.21%
Atlantic Monthly 544,321 910,127 67.20%
Atlantic Monthly 254,317 417,002 63.97%
Tech Republic 20,207 33,030 63.46%
GoodHousekeeping 692,948 1,123,804 62.18%
MediaBistro 500,933 806,740 61.05%
Taste of Home Magazine 1,005,628 1,608,373 59.94%
Woman’s Day 66,032 105,278 59.43%
AWAIOnline 24,270 38,187 57.34%
Fast Company 406,305 632,526 55.68%
Popular Science 254,290 395,798 55.65%
CFO Magazine 63,333 98,412 55.39%
Sunset Magazine 149,776 231,739 54.72%
The Onion 1,055,678 1,627,210 54.14%
MarketingProfs 138,170 210,814 52.58%
Beading Daily 42,568 63,143 48.33%
History.com 655,572 963,218 46.93%
CNN.com 12,886,794 18,903,404 46.69%
Washington Post 5,539,139 8,104,330 46.31%
Reader’s Digest 1,078,841 1,571,595 45.67%
AllRecipes.com 7,020,056 10,167,162 44.83%
Oprah.com 2,528,013 3,585,666 41.84%
TexasMonthly 51,288 71,562 39.53%
MotorTrend 959,717 1,324,356 37.99%
Yoga Journal 93,530 127,202 36.00%
Computerworld 421,896 573,363 35.90%
Folio 48,420 65,802 35.90%
Cosmopolitan 728,716 985,319 35.21%
Wine Spectator 72,637 98,140 35.11%
Knitting Daily 104,734 141,316 34.93%
Writers Digest 958,770 1,280,661 33.57%
Southern Living 291,931 389,939 33.57%
Mother Earth News 487,232 648,444 33.09%
Organic Gardening 71,809 94,409 31.47%
The Wall Street Journal 8,657,158 11,285,757 30.36%
Daring Fireball 76,669 99,755 30.11%
Houston Chronicle 1,400,139 1,811,482 29.38%
New York Magazine 1,389,056 1,788,882 28.78%
Money 6,826,745 8,756,307 28.26%
ESPN 10,668,708 13,514,459 26.67%
The Knot 838,042 1,045,272 24.73%
Ask the Builder 474,793 582,739 22.74%
About.com 34,743,634 42,347,830 21.89%
SethGodin 25,395 30,814 21.34%
BabyCenter 3,962,799 4,796,766 21.04%
Economist 477,204 573,341 20.15%
ArsTechnica 1,132,684 1,360,793 20.14%
Horse Channel 42,833 51,364 19.92%
Martha Stewart 1,351,294 1,591,887 17.80%
Ancestry.com 5,011,938 5,891,321 17.55%
NYTimes 10,906,498 12,790,017 17.27%
Medical Economics 126,167 146,301 15.96%
American Artists 14,715 17,032 15.75%
TVGuide 3,290,908 3,799,031 15.44%
Entrepreneur 648,088 742,008 14.49%
MacWorld 432,569 492,520 13.86%
Chicago Tribune 2,125,490 2,405,187 13.16%
Cook’s Illustrated 532,769 601,491 12.90%
Barrons 740,463 827,740 11.79%
PCWorld 4,957,697 5,496,231 10.86%
GigaOM 386,969 424,613 9.73%
ClickZ 272,438 294,600 8.13%
All Things Digital 419,256 444,262 5.96%
newteevee 121,227 127,255 4.97%
Safety Daily Advisor 154,371 160,271 3.82%
Firehouse 61,557 63,441 3.06%
The Motley Fool 3,831,197 3,908,523 2.02%
USAToday 14,220,229 14,493,644 1.92%
WineEnthusiast 14,220,229 14,493,644 1.92%
People 9,970,467 10,143,670 1.74%
BusinessWeek 2,671,082 2,702,708 1.18%
Morningstar 468,368 472,208 0.82%
National Geographic 899,114 905,392 0.70%
Kottke 165,036 165,014 0.01%
Minneapolis Star Tribune 1,214,091 1,208,412 0.47%
New England Journal of Medicine 266,218 262,157 1.53%
Consumer Reports 3,145,673 3,032,491 3.60%
Thoroughbred Times 49,356 46,199 6.40%
GuyKawasaki 152,161 140,727 7.51%
Investment U 73,945 67,460 8.77%
The Daily Reckoning 100,329 88,111 12.18%
WebWorkerDaily 178,701 156,460 12.45%
International Living 122,385 106,411 13.05%
A List Apart 264,777 226,338 14.52%
Smart Money 1,168,816 992,324 15.10%
Harvard Health Beat 88,871 74,462 16.21%
ChristianityToday 626,915 513,561 18.08%
Forbes 12,817,044 9,878,871 22.92%
NetworkWorld 1,182,536 884,759 25.18%
Investors Business Daily 338,634 252,433 25.46%
Playboy 1,605,345 1,184,791 26.20%
Time 9,638,660 6,983,808 27.54%
Marketing Sherpa 186,980 134,258 28.20%
Newsweek 1,873,146 1,266,831 32.37%
SportsIllustrated 6,569,648 4,188,510 36.24%
FDANews 12,385 7,521 39.27%
MarketWatch 6,414,234 3,453,334 46.16%
EarlyToRise 189,552 51,183 73.00%
Money & Markets 381,397 72,232 81.06%

The Mequoda HotList is put together to name one publisher each year who has seen tremendous growth. The publisher who lands at the top of our hotlist, gets our new annual Mequoda Rocket Award.

Our Rocket Award Winner this year was Guideposts.com, which we announced and presented at the Mequoda Summit in Boston on October 7th, 2009.

To create the Rocket Awards, Mequoda put together a list of over 250 online publishing websites. Companies were selected based on sites Mequoda.com has written about over the last 5 years, plus several sites that were nominated by the Mequoda Research Team.

In order to be considered for the award a site must following the four online publishing guidelines:

  • Content-driven – the site must publish content at least three times weekly using a periodical website archetype.
  • Google-friendly – the website must use proper title tags, meta tags, and tag online content or otherwise optimize content for search engines.
  • Subscriber-centric – the website must encourage users to sign up for their email newsletters, RSS feeds, or otherwise subscribe to a regular free feed of their content.
  • Multi-platform – the publisher must offer content on at least three platforms, such as books, events, webinars, seminars, or any other mediums.

Picture 615

Out of the 250 publishers originally on the Rocket Award list, only about 60 made it to the “Hot List”, meaning that they met all four criteria above, plus they had to have seen more than 20% growth in traffic from June 2008 to June 2009. The list you see above is the result of that research.

Using Compete.com data, we also dropped anyone from the list who had under 10k unique visitors per month in July 08, because for sites with less than 10K in traffic, the Compete data is less stable.

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