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.
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.
