According to information gathered by the folks at alexa.com, as of may 2011, the top 10 most visited sites on the web are:

1. google.com,
2. facebook.com,
3. youtube.com
4. yahoo.com
5. blogger.com
6. baidu.com
7. Wikipedia.com
8. live.com
9. twitter.com
10. qq.com

These are the heavy hitters on the Internet.. They receive ~90% of the web's pageviews. What does this tell us?

Half of them--Google, Yahoo, Baidu, Live and QQ, are all portals to the rest of the web. They employ search algorithms to help you sift through the vast sea of information on the rest of the internet.

Facebook, youtube, blogger, wikipedia and twitter, however, all work by giving you access to content created by third parties and stored on their servers. The're the best of the web 2.0. They've managed to take your stories/information/ideas along with those of your peers and turned them into a commodity that allows them to sell ad space. For all the democratization and non-hierarchical organizing that the internet has made possible, it has also concentrated power in some quirky ways.

As far as sites that (mostly) create content on their own, we've got:

1. news.yahoo.com
2. bbc.co.uk
3. bbc.co.uk/news/
4. nytimes.com
5. cnn.com
6. huffingtonpost.com
7. weather.com
8. reddit.com
9. my.yahoo.com
10. msnbc.msn.com

These are the top news sites on the internet. None of these sites is in the general top 10+, and most of them occupy their position at the top of this list because of previously established notoriety. These news sources have history and have remained at the top of their game because people trust their reporting and because people are used to getting their news from one source.

Reddit and The Huffington Post are interesting exceptions to this rule. They operate on a model closer to that of the first group of sites, fueled by user-generated content. They're also both relative newcomers, holding their own against giants like CNN. While on one hand this indicates a decreased concentration of power whereby the information sharing process is more democratic and anyone can do journalism, the tendency among sites of this sort is to rely on people to create content for free. As a result, you've got a ton of people, each doing a little bit of work, and a handful of folks getting paid handsomely for the labor of others. Yeah. I'm looking at you, Arianna Huffington.