Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

This is making the blog rounds today: Dreamhost, a Los Angeles-based web hosting company, accidentially overcharged its customers to the tune of $7.5M, due to a billing error. (Disclaimer: this blog page–but not our main site–happens to be hosted on Dreamhost. And yes, we did get a mysterious billing notice yesterday.)

comScore, the firm which tracks Internet traffic trends, issues web rankings every month on the top web sites. Today, two Southern California firms showed up on the firm’s top 10 list of companies having increases in unique visitors: JibJab and Buzznet. JibJab, the Santa Monica-based firm which runs an online content site focused on comedy and humor content, showed up as number two in the biggest increase in uniques for December; the firm went from 1.7M uniques to 4.4M uniques, a 156% increase in the number of visitors. Buzznet, which is based in Los Angeles and operates a social media, music-focused social networking site, also saw a big bump, going from 3.1M users to 4.97M unique users in December, up 60%. JibJab is venture backed by Polaris; Buzznet is backed by Anthem Ventures and Redpoint.

comScore just released their Top 50 web rankings for November, and several Southern California companies made the rankings. Among the top sites, Fox Interactive Media (including MySpace.com) was number 5; at number 22, was Gorilla Nation; Shopzilla–undoubtedly boosted by the holiday shopping season–was at number 26; Yellowpages.com — out of Pasadena — was number 29; Disney Online, at number 30; United Online was number 40; and ARTISTdirect at 46.

Also among the rankings was the top 50 advertising networks. A quick scan of the list shows a number of Southern California companies ranking highly in this sector: ValueClick is ranked number 6 on the list; MySpace at 28; Gorilla Nation at 29; AdDynamix at 35; and Business.com at 38.