With rec.humor.funny at only 2 messages per day, we figure that almost all readers read every message, except for the long postings and perhaps some of the administrivia. So the readership of a rec.humor.funny message is vastly greater than that of an alt.sex message, and of just about any other message on the net. It also is affected by the factor described below for news.announce groups. It may be the most widely read group, but there is strong reason to believe that it does so well because many sites put it in the default subscription for a new user. That is the idea behind the group.
Nobody really knows how to compare the top newsgroups with the top web pages.
The top web page is probably Netscape's home page, at least when it comes to glancing. These are of course directory pages, not pages to read, but even so, their readership is quite large. Some web pages may well be the holders of the top spots. Nobody knows how accurate the 500,000 reader figure for rec.humor.funny was either. Also, pages like the entry screens for online services like AOL and Compuserve may have a claim for the title.