2006-10-14

The long tail of the web world

Hitwise has an interesting report, US - Top 25 Popular Websites. The report lists the percentage of 'visit' market share.

Site #1 (MySpace) clocks in at 4.9%, while #25 (AOL Mail) garners a 'mere' 0.26%. The total market share for all 25 sites is roughly 33%. The total market share for the top 10 is just over 28%.

I'm struck by several things when looking at these numbers.
  • The biggest gorilla in the zoo has less than 5% of the pie.

  • The market share drops quite fast, with #25 at one quarter of one percent.

  • The top ten sites are the only ones with more than 1% market share.


My understanding is that Hitwise measures a specific list of markets, so it's distinctly possible that it's missing some significant segments - who knows. Also, we are talking about statistics. Thar be dragons. Still, the overall curve is hard to deny. Most of the web is in the tail!

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to think of popular web sites not listed in the Hitwise top 25.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, this comment is spam but, at least, it's fan-spam :-) - Could not locate your email.

Read you book today and found myself laughing aloud at "The message is the medium" line. Luckily, no one was around, as I would be perceived at quite odd, laughing at a protocols book.

It's a pity there's no updated version of the book. I assume much has changed during these 8 years.

Thanks (for the book and for the laugh)

avin at bmntech.com

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