My Three Favorite Sites (in no particular order)
I can't ignore this one. I spend far more time on facebook or youtube, but tumblr remains one of my all-time favorite websites for a few reasons. It grants so many people the opportunity to share content with one another, and with a very straight-forward and generally satisfying selection of prefabricated formats, you get a wide variety of tumblr blogs with as wide a variety of topics. It's never boring, and when it is you can leave. Fun fact: This class tumblr is my fourth tumblr account. I have my personal tumblr, one dedicated to videogame art that I ran with a friend for a while, this tumblr, and my current biggest project, HoneyandOnions.tumblr.com, which is my ongoing webcomic. I love tumblr.
Tumblr floats between a few site categories; it's certainly for entertainment, but it serves as photo/video sharing, blogging or social media, and many (myself included) use it for a personal site. I would almost argue its existence as a news website, as I've certainly learned all about the world at large and recent events via tumblr posts and articles that aren't sensationalist or negative enough to worm their way into the greater bulk of media. The main audience of Tumblr should be considered everybody ever, but I guess it'd only be fair to narrow it down to "people with internet", "people ages 12 to 44 (based on real demographic breakdowns of tumblr)" and like.. "people who like things".
Tumblr is also kindof hard to place in regards to goal. It's valued incredibly high despite having little to no advertising. It has way more page views than nearly any other similar site, and its value sits at a healthy $800,000,000 (last I checked), which is probably mostly for the sheer amount of people's time that it as a site commands. When you for all intents and purposes own days of people's weeks you really don't need any other goal, seems to me.
2. http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/
I'm going to put this one mid-list because I really don't feel very strongly for it, but it's among the very few websites I've gone to time and time again with no complaint whatsoever. It's simple, it's straightforward and it gets you straight to the content that you want: comedians in cars getting coffee. No messing around, and when it does deviate from the content it's pleasant on the eye and well-refined.
It's most definitely an entertainment website, that's simple enough. The audience is probably a mixture of older Seinfeld fans and a younger generation who found him through his recent years doing stand-up comedy, and his friendship/occasional collaboration with decidedly younger comedians like Luis CK and Ricky Gervais.
The goal of the site is a little harder.. due mostly to the site's layout, there're only a couple of opportunities for ad revenue, and most of those are clearly passed up (I had to disable my ad-block to check, and it seems the only advertisement is before the clip itself without any static banners or pop-ups on the site, thank god.) It's possible he just wants to have fun with some friends in the public arena while generating content and further establishing a fan-base. That's a fairly boring answer but it's also the most likely one.
I don't want to be biased here, but the more I learn about my employer the more I can't stop appreciating their attention to brand identity. With iOS 7 rolling out soon, things are slowly but surely changing, and it's fascinating to see brand strategies developing more or less in the open (if you've been keeping an eye on the beta of iCloud and like.. previews or full versions of iOS 7).
Apple.com is a commercial website with an audience of basically anybody looking to buy from Apple or just looking at what the latest and greatest from one of the top hardware and software developers is (whether or not they like it and whether or not it's objectively any good). The audience is probably younger, and generally tech-savvy crowd, as the explanations don't tend to pander too much to those with little-to-no tech experience.
The goal of Apple.com is very clearly to sell Apple as a brand, as a series of products and as a solution to problems you may not have known you had in the first place. As a commercial website, its goal is about as straightforward as I think you could get.