Are we wallflowers?

[Steve]

Anybody wanna take a crack at determining our popularity?

================================

Compute Your Own Web Traffic Rank

Jakob Nielsen
Useit.com Alertbox 11/98 - Sidebar


As long as Yahoo remains the most popular site on the Web and
continues to publish its traffic data in regular press releases, you
have an easy way to calculate the popularity ranking of your own
website: where your site stands relative to the other sites on the
Web. 

Web traffic follows a Zipf distribution, meaning that it has a few
very large sites, a decent number of mid-sized sites, and a huge
number of small sites. In general, the Zipf distribution says that
traffic for the N'th most popular website will be 

T = Y/N (where T is the site's own traffic and Y is the traffic on
the most popular site)

In other words, the Web's tenth most popular site will have 10% of
Yahoo's traffic, site number 100 will have 1% of Yahoo's traffic, and
so on down the line to site number three million which has
1/3,000,000 the traffic of Yahoo: about 48 page views per day, which
sounds about right for one of the least popular sites. 

Simple arithmetic makes it possible to change the traffic formula
into a popularity formula: 

N = Y/T (where N = your site's popularity rank.  Y = page views on 
the Web's most popular site.  T = your site's traffic in page views)

Yahoo's traffic in September 1998 was 144 million page views per day,
or 1.01 billion page views per week. During that period, my own site,
www.useit.com received 110,360 page views per week. Thus, the formula
says that useit had a popularity rank of 1,008,000,000/110,360 =
9,134. Estimating useit to be approximately number 9,000 on the Web
corresponds well with data from Alexa's Internet traffic measures
which placed useit among the 10,000 sites with the most traffic. 

In other words, data from your own server logs combined with freely
available information from Yahoo's press releases are sufficient to
give you a pretty good idea of how you rank relative to the other
sites on the Web. People often pay thousands of dollars for this
information, so you have saved a lot of money by reading the Alertbox
today. 



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