Most Influential Beer Brands on the Internet (2016 edition)

It’s that time of year again!  With a boom in all things BEER this year, we want to know who is leading the charge as the top 20 Most Influential Beer Brands on the Internet in 2016.

Same as last year, our analysis includes three factors:

• Alexa Rating: A relatively accurate (though not perfect) indication of a website’s popularity.
• Facebook Likes: Social media carries a lot of weight in deciphering a website’s influence on the web, therefore, we consider the number of Facebook likes in our analysis.
• Twitter Followers: The same goes for Twitter as for FaceBook

In 2016, the Zephyr Conferences team again analyzed a total of 85 popular English-language beer-related websites. We allocated from 25 to 1 point for each time a site was in the top 25 of Alexa rating, Facebook likes, and Twitter followers.  The website with the best Alexa rating received 25 points and the website with the 25th best Alexa rating received one point. Combining the score of the three categories provides a maximum possible score of 75. We recorded data on January 4, 2016.

Our top three websites for 2016:

• Heineken Is our leader again this year and remains the Most Influential Beer Brand on the Internet.  With a total score of 62 points, Heineken is well above the pack with over 20 million Facebook likes.  Budweiser, who ranks #6 this year boasts our second most Facebook likes at just over 13 million.
• Beer Advocate magazine also stayed in the number two spot, again scoring first with an outstanding Alexa rating of 8,587 (meaning it is the 8,587 th most popular website in the world in terms of visitors that use the Alexa toolbar.)  Additionally, Beer Advocate scored first in Twitter followers with 543,000.
• New Belgium Brewing took back the number 3 ranking from Dogfish Head this year by a 2 point lead (Dogfish Head scored 45 total points and New Belgium scored 47).

Here are the Top 20 for 2016:

Rank	Company	Website	Score
1	Heineken	www.heineken.com	62
2	Beer Advocate	http://beeradvocate.com	54
3	New Belgium Brewing	www.newbelgium.com/	47
4	Dogfish Head Craft Brewery	www.dogfish.com	45
5	Stone Brewing Company	http://stonebrewing.com/	43
6	Budweiser	www.budweiser.com	42
7	Bud Light	www.budlight.com	41
8	BJ’s Brewhouse	http://bjsbrewhouse.com/	40
9	Miller Lite	www.millerlite.com	39
10	Coors Light	www.coorslight.com	34
11 tie	Sierra Nevada Brewing Company	www.sierranevada.com	29
11 tie	BrewDog	www.brewdog.com	29
13 tie	Samuel Adams	www.samueladams.com	24
13 tie	RateBeer.com	www.ratebeer.com	24
13 tie	Drink Craft Beer	www.drinkcraftbeer.com	24
16	Untapped	http://untappd.com/	23
17	Guinness	www.guinness.com	22
18 tie	Dos Equis	www.dosequis.com	21
18 tie	Rogue Ales	www.rogue.com	21
18 tie	More Beer!	www.morebeer.com	21

Other items to note in our 2016 analysis:

• We had three ties for 11th, 13th and 18th place on our analysis.
• There was not a lot of movement from last year and no website moved into or out of our Top 20 list.
• We still have three craft breweries taking three of the top five spots in the rankings (Dogfish Head, New Belgium, and Stone) and their brands are truly fantastic.  Each has done an outstanding job of developing a strong online presence.
• The largest leap up was from BJ’s Brewhouse going from 14th in 2015 to 8th position this year.  BJ’s gained over 22k Facebook likes and increased their Alexa ranking from 201,700 to 49,372 – both the largest gains on our analysis.

As with last year, please remember the following.

1. We undoubtedly made mistakes. Take a look at the data (Most Influential Beer Brands Analysis), which shows only those sites receiving a score, and please provide any corrections or sites we are missing so we can update future versions.
2. This analysis is a snap shot in time. The stats change daily. We’ll do this analysis again next year.
3. Deciding what factors into the ranking is arbitrary. We know Alexa rating is biased towards a certain type of site visitor and realize social media plays heavily into these results. We are open to other suggestions but think this is a good start.

Please tell us what you think!  We would love to collaborate with our readers on this report or work to develop a new report that is useful to our community.

Note: If you appreciate the time and effort we put into this analysis, please consider promoting this post on Facebook or Twitter. You can follow Zephyr Adventures or the Beer Bloggers Conference on Twitter and like us on Facebook (Zephyr, Beer Bloggers Conference). Who knows? Perhaps some year we’ll make our own list.

See last year’s results here: http://beerbloggersconference.org/2015/01/20-influential-beer-websites-world-2015