February 4, 2011 – 14 websites related to Marina City have lined up in the new year with rankings in at least the top 21 percent of all sites worldwide. Most of them are in the top six percent. One is very nearly at the top and its domain is currently valued at almost $1.4 million.

skyscrapercity.com, operated by Marina City resident Jan Klerks, continues its lead with an Alexa rank in early February of 1,592.

Klerks, currently on a snowboarding vacation in Austria, was skeptical of an estimated value of his website of $1,396,686 by Cubestat, which considers traffic rankings from three sources, as well as other analytics.

“I’ve seen these valuation sites before,” he says, “and pretty much all are based on numbers that are way off, so I guess they need to be taken with a bit more than a grain of salt, more like a large scoop of it.”

A distant second on the list is chicagocarless.com, written by Michael Doyle, who moved back to Marina City this week after residing less than a year in Lincoln Square. Mused Doyle on Thursday, referring to a resident who left to serve 21 months in a federal prison, “If Marina City is good enough for Gary Kimmel to come back, it’s good enough for me.”

In third place is the website for Crimson Lounge at Hotel Sax, showing the most improvement in traffic of the 14 sites, with a 70 percent increase in its Alexa ranking since November 2010.

Rounding off the top five are sites for BIN 36 and a blog by architecture writer Lynn Becker.

Meanwhile, Compete, another major analytics service, ranked the top five Marina City sites as skyscrapercity.com, 10pinchicago.com, crimsonchicago.com, chicagocarless.com, and marinacityonline.com.

Chart (above) shows Marina City-related sites with relatively higher traffic on the left. (Click on image to view larger version.) While the website of downtown personality Vincent Falk is the last of the Alexa-ranked sites, it still received more traffic than roughly 86 million other websites, including the site for Marina Towers Condominium Association.

There was not enough traffic to rank chicago.dickslastresort.com, chicago.transwestern.net, landmarkmarinacitynow.org, marinacitychicagogiftshopgallery.com, and mymtca.com.

Also new on the list is the site of Cesar Russ, a photographer who recently leased commercial space at Marina City. Retired from the list was architechgallery.com.

In 2007, a survey of web servers estimated there are more than 108 million websites.