July 27, 2003
Blogosphere Traffic Concentration
On Outside the Beltway, James Joyner has a look at N.Z. Bear's weblog traffic statistics and comments on the amount of traffic concentrated on the top blogs. (Clay Shirky wrote here on traffic concentration.)
Here's what the data looked like as of July 7, 2003:
As of that date (with Instapundit's traffic understated due to his vacation), the total average daily traffic of the top 10 sites (109,707 visits) exceeded that of the 671 other sites (102,500 visits).
Here's the cumulative amount of total traffic accounted for by each of the top 200 blogs. As noted, the top 10 account for more than 50% of all traffic. The top 50 account for more than 75% of all traffic and the top 200 shown here account for more than 92% of all traffic.
Amazing. Did you hand code all the data, or is there some easy way to extract it? I actually had to input it by hand into an Excel spreadsheet.
Posted by: James Joyner at 07:05 PMNeither, actually. The traffic and linkage data were extracted using some Excel tricks and rather ugly formulas. The blog-age data, though, were hand-gathered.
Posted by: Oscar Jr. at 07:30 PMSilly boys.
I'm right here, guys. If you want the data, ask! I can't help with blog-age, but the rest of it is sitting in a database that's quite easy for me to export from.
I just sent James a .csv file with the latest data; Oscar, if you want it, just let me know.
-NZB
Posted by: N.Z. Bear at 09:38 PMNZB:
I didn't want to bother you, but next time I will!
By the way, are you tracking the traffic statistics over time now (i.e., saving the historical daily averages)? It would be great if these data showed up on invididual blogs' details pages in the Ecosystem.
Anyway, thanks for visiting,
OJr.
Posted by: Oscar Jr. at 10:31 PMIt would indeed be useful. I've run the numbers based on Bear's excel file: See them here.
One thing that occurs to me is that, given the overwhelming traffic disparity of the top handful of sites vs all the rest is that the traffic ratings of the "second tier" blogs are likely *highly* volatile based on linkage by one of the top blogs. For example, a site regularly getting 250 visitors would just to well over 1000 visitors (weekly average) with a good InstaLanche.
Posted by: James Joyner at 01:12 PM
