For the past few years, eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) has been on top of the e-commerce websites. But the website's long running dominance has been fading recently, and was made more evident this past month as the site posted smaller audience numbers than its main rival Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN).

One of the main reasons for the changing of the guard last month was the fact that Amazon has tapped into the secret of eBay's success. Amazon is taking a page right out of eBay's play book and allowing independent sellers to post items on the site for other users to purchase.

eBay users have been sending the company a message that they are starting to grow tired of higher fees, and increased numbers of counterfeit products that can be found on the company's website. eBay has vowed to do its best to keep counterfeit items off the site, but for now buyers are still wary of items being sold on the site.

Those of you who have been interested in blogs for several years are probably well aware of the company Technorati. This website made a splash by becoming the first market-share dominator in the entire Web 2.0 space, especially in the blog search engine space. But times have changed and Technorati is struggling to hold on.

The situation in Technorati is quickly shifting to more difficult, seemingly by the day. As TheDeal.com reported on Friday, the founding CEO of the company recently stepped down. In addition, the company has been forced to recently slash eight jobs to adjust the company's expense structure. Perhaps the most startling of it all -- Technorati is quickly losing its dominant market share position.

According to research firm Hitwise, Technorati's number one market share position is now just secured by 1%. The company currently stands at 34% of the blog search market, while Google's blog search product is a strong and growing 33%.

As you can see from the chart below (courtesy of Alexa.com), Technorati's page views figures are well off of their peak. Understandably, this traffic decline has been a huge catalyst to a weakening position in the blog search market, as well as financial difficulties, because for most internet companies, traffic is everything.

The Alexa Internet ranking system is widely used as a technical gauge for reviewing performance of specific websites. While similar in concept to the Nielsen ratings for television viewership, Alexa data is drawn from a deeper pool of resources but some say from a narrower demographic.

Alexa rankings are gained by data submitted through users of the Alexa toolbar. With over 10 million of those toolbars currently downloaded, one could accept the suggestion that the Alexa user base represents a fair statistical sample. Alexa was founded in April 1996 and was acquired by Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) in 1999 for approximately $250 million in Amazon stock.

According to figures released recently by ComScore, audience growth at Google Inc.(NASDAQ:GOOG) and Fox Interactive (which includes MySpace) was well ahead of other major web properties.

Overall Internet unique visitors grew 2% in September 2006 compared to the same month a year earlier hitting 173.4 million in the US.

The Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) sites were still the largest property, but that may not last much longer. Yahoo! sites grew 5% to 129.7 million unique users. Right behind was the Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) network of sites which includes AOL. TWX sites grew just 1% to 120.3 million. In third place was the Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) network, which includes MSN. They were up 4% over last September to 119.4 million.

Google has impressive growth of 23% year-over-year to 107.4 million. It will pick up over 20 million new unique visitors with YouTube. EBay was next, but well behind Google, with 79 million unique visitors, up 13%.

Fox/MySpace grew by far the most of any of the other major network properties, rising 342%, with MySpace as the primary engine, to 70.9 million unique users.

If the current trend continues, Google may be in first place within a few months. Fox could quite easily top the 100 million unique visitor threshold. And, Microsoft and Time Warner will battle for third place.

It is a case where the traffic race may go to the swiftest.

Douglas McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.