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Welcome to the .Net100 - a ranking that measures the top sites on the web with the .net domain extension. Entrepreneur and Verisign came together to assemble the ranking, which is based on quantitative factors and the feedback from Entrepreneur's audience of sophisticated, successful business owners. Together, we then gathered traffic and social metrics for each site, as well as your votes to determine the rankings (see the full methodology here).
1
SlideShare claims to be the largest network for uploading and sharing presentations, with an estimated 60 million users and 130 million pageviews. Everyone from teachers, businesses and government agencies use it to pass around and edit presentations. That has made the company, based in San Francisco, one of the top 200 visited sites in the world, SlideShare says.
2
PHP is an all-purpose scripting language used in web development, though it is also used in general programming. PHP.net is the hub for the language, allowing for free downloading and sharing. PHP has grown in popularity because it is easy to use for beginners and compatible with just about all the servers used today.
3
Like Blizzard games, like World of Warcraft , Diablo III and Hearthstone? Then Battle.net is your home. The site is a community for gamers, set up by Blizzard Entertainment to keep their users talking -- and gaming -- together in one place. It also serves as an e-commerce platform for Blizzard.
4
Behance.net, owned by Adobe, is a portfolio for creative people. The goal? Put people's creative work in front of the companies looking to hire talent. The company lets people upload their work, then makes that available to other sites and companies looking for new employees.
5
Ever wonder whether you're really getting the fastest speed from broadband? Ookla Speedtest is a free tool that tests broadband speed. The company claims to perform 50 million tests every month, through the web, but also through iPhones and Android phones.
6
Explosm is an Internet comics site, filled with online favorites like Cyanide & Happiness. Read the comic, check out dates for comic show appearances and buy plushy toys.
7
SourceForge is a community-collaboration opensource sof ware-development site owned by Slashdot Media. The company claims to be the home of 3.4 million developers, working on 324,000 projects. There are an estimated 4 million downloads.
8
American Apparel is known for its trendy clothes and racy photos, and all are on display on its .net site. You can do what you would expect: buy clothes, find stores and gawk at the models. But there is more. The site is also an explanation of the philosophy and culture behind the company, including its political activism.
9
If you ever saw a great deal at a store and wanted to share it with a friend, you probably used Slickdeals. The company is a user-generated forum for bargains. All the deals come from shoppers, not companies. In fact, Slickdeals doesn't even allow paid placement from companies.
10
People browse DocuSign.com to see what the company of ers in document and contract sharing and creation. But actual customers enter through the .net site. Most of the commerce for Docusign, which includes saving the time and trouble of sharing physical documents, happens in a .net environment.
11
Boing Boing is a news site devoted to what it calls "the weird, wonderful and wicked things to be found in technology and culture." The site publishes a mix of short articles, long features, and video productions, all with its unique viewpoint. It claims a million readers a month.
12
When you're done singing along on your car radio to "Still Into You" and suddenly fi nd yourself a fan of Paramore, the place to learn more is paramore.net. The hugely popular band from Franklin, Tenn., manages its online presence here, with blog posts, videos, photos and audio downloads.
13
Think of Geeksaresexy as nerdvana, a news site dedicated to technology and science. There is a load of video and textual content geared toward viral content about gaming, sci-fi and the latest in tech developments. There is a heavy emphasis on the fun and fabulous, like the videos of people dressed as knights and ninjas crashing a wedding. You get the idea.
14
Bruce thinks .net is the Boss. The site is all things Bruce, with tour dates, music, bios of Springsteen and the E Street band, and a merchandise store. It also features a neat interactive timeline of the Boss's career, dating back to 1971.
15
If you're into hip-hop and R&B and want to keep up on the latest in music and videos, djbooth.net is your home. The site is all about the music, with artists, both signed and unsigned, uploading their latest tracks directly. The djbooth community then reviews and recommends what they hear.
Methodology
The rankings for all .net 100 sites were based on a special formula developed by Entrepreneur that calculates online traffic, social influence and community voting. The process began with a list of the top-ranked sites with a .net domain as measured by Alexa.com. On Entrepreneur.com, visitors were able to nominate their favorite .net sites for consideration in the ranking. We then quantified the size of each site's social network, through their Facebook and Twitter-follower numbers. From there, we factored their social influence using each site's Klout.com score. During the nomination period, visitors were also able to vote for and rank their top 10 favorite .net sites. These votes were factored into the final formula applied to the rankings. All .net 100 sites were given a cumulative score based on the above factors, and the 100 .net sites with the highest cumulative scores became the .net 100.