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This graphic (also a draft figure from the book) presents a more comprehensive picture of Internet traffic, at least at the very top. Instead of looking at categories of content, this figure is a network map of traffic among the 50 most visited Websites (with adult sites omitted). As above, the traffic to a site is proportional to the Website's area; the width of lines between sites is proportional to the number of users visiting site A immediately after site B. Because Hitwise has access to ISP data, this does not necessarily mean that users followed a direct link between the two sites; they could also have used a browser bookmark, or typed in a URL. Arrows indicate the direction of traffic flow. To provide a sense of scale, MySpace, the most popular site in the figure, accounts for 6.3 percent of all non-adult Web traffic; Google attracts an additional 4.8 percent. The traffic between MySpace and MySpace Mail, the widest edge on the graph, represents 2.5 percent of all non-adult traffic.  Click on the map for a full-size version; click the link below to read more about the figure.
This small set of sites gets a hugely disproportionate share of Web traffic. Taken together, these top 50 sites---out of the 773,000 that Hitwise tracked---received 41 percent of Web traffic for the week of May 12, 007, when this data was collected. Even this number is deceptive; there is an enormous disparity in traffic between the top 7 or 8 Websites, and the rest of the top 50. Every site listed gets a substantial portion of its traffic from at least one of the top 10 Websites. As expected, there is a great deal of traffic sharing between Google-branded, Yahoo-branded, and MySpace-branded sites. There are no political sites among this top 50. If the graphic was expanded to include the top 100 sites in the Hitwise data---or even the top 500 sites -- not a single political site would qualify for inclusion. For April 2007, HuffingtonPost.com and FreeRepublic.com were the most popular political Websites. Huffington Post ranked 796th among all non-adult Websites; Free Republic was ranked 871st. |
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