People watch stocks for different reasons -- they're waiting for a dip in price, watching for a specific catalyst, gathering all the news and information that might affect stocks they already own, or considering a sell. Regardless of their motivation, we can better understand market sentiment by seeing who's watching what. With the Fool's free My Watchlist service, we have tens of thousands of people telling us the businesses that have, for whatever reason, piqued their interest.

With this data, we've come up with a new metric, watch interest, to inform investors what stocks their peers keep tabs on in each industry. In the case of the internet retail industry, watch interest is the percentage of people keeping an eye on internet retail stocks in general who are specifically watching each company. By looking at what stocks people are most interested in an industry, you can get ahead of the curve by finding hot stocks that you might have otherwise overlooked.

The most-watched internet retail stock is ...
Looking at the aggregate data, we see that Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) outshines the rest in terms of watch interest -- and for good reason. As CAPS player comicinvestor wrote last week:

While Amazon, RedBox, HBO and Apple may strengthen their competitive offerings, none of them have the infrastructure that Netflix has. Netflix is slowly and carefully branching out globally without diluting their brand. Despite the recent price raise, they're still the best game in town, and I think for the foreseeable future.

Here are the rest of the top 15 most-watched companies in the industry, their watch interest, and the stocks' CAPS rating, to show what our investing community thinks of them.

No.

Company

Market Cap (millions)

CAPS Rating

Watch Interest

1

Netflix $12,667 ** 44.2%

2

Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) $92,013 *** 27.8%

3

PetMed Express (Nasdaq: PETS) $218 **** 11.7%

4

priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) $26,204 ** 5.4%

5

E-Commerce China Dangdang (Nasdaq: DANG) $725 * 3.1%

6

Expedia (Nasdaq: EXPE) $7,838 ** 1.6%

7

Blue Nile (Nasdaq: NILE) $518 ** 0.9%

8

Shutterfly (Nasdaq: SFLY) $1,623 **** 0.8%

9

Nutrisystem (Nasdaq: NTRI) $361 *** 0.7%

10

Overstock.com (Nasdaq: OSTK) $255 * 0.6%

11

MakeMyTrip (Nasdaq: MMYT) $678 ** 0.5%

12

ValueVision Media (Nasdaq: VVTV) $265 * 0.4%

13

Orbitz Worldwide (NYSE: OWW) $277 ** 0.3%

14

1-800-Flowers.com (Nasdaq: FLWS) $176 * 0.3%

15

Geeknet (Nasdaq: GKNT) $140 * 0.2%

Source: Motley Fool, Motley Fool CAPS.

Whether you're keeping an eye on the industry stalwarts like Netflix, or monitoring an up-and-comer like 1-800-Flowers.com, it pays to watch. We can help you keep tabs on your companies with My Watchlist, our free, personalized stock tracking service. Click here to start now.