Eight years ago this week, Future Tense made its debut. About the same time, Internet research firm comScore Media Metrix issued its first report looking at the most trafficked Web sites on the 'Net. We thought we'd look back at that report to get a glimpse at how the 'Net has changed since we first went on the air.

Graham Mudd is a comScore Media Metrix analyst.

MUDD: In the beginning of 1996, we estimate that approximately 20 million people were online from from U.S. households. That's about 10 percent of households.

How does that compare to today?

MUDD: In January 2004, there were approximately 135 million household Internet users. That's between 60 and 70 percent depending on the estimate of household size.

Sometimes we think technological change is not coming fast enough. But that's quite a change in just eight years.

MUDD: It's 600-plus percent.

What kind of sites were the most trafficked back in '96 and how does that compare to today?

MUDD: The Web of the mid-90's was dominated by ISP sites, search engines and university sites. A lot has changed. While we see that ISP's and search engines are still near the top, many of them have taken the form
of portals. Three major networks of sites (AOL, MSN and Yahoo) now dominate the top 50 sites. And in fact those sites each reach more than 70 percent of the Internet population, and collectively reach nearly every single Internet user.

It's sort of fun to look back at the top sites of '96 for the oldies-but-goodies like Infoseek, Compuserve, Prodigy, Well.com and umich.edu. That's so different from today.

MUDD: It is. And back in 1996, there wasn't much of anything in terms of e-commerce or especially online travel. But in 2003 we saw more than 90 billion dollars spent and that's excluding auctions. If you look at just
travel alone, it was 40 billion dollars. It's become a major marketplace.