Webcomics Traffic in Perspective
by Joey Manley
In a very informative post on the Alexa blog, Geoffrey Mack lays bare the dirty secret of the Long Tail — the continued existence of the, um, Very Short Body: in other words, if your site isn’t in the top 1% of all websites, then its traffic is, for all intents and purposes, basically the same as everybody else’s.
Have a look at this graph of the top 200,000 websites:
Looks like an empty graph, right? Pay close attention to the bottom, left-hand corner. That’s pretty much where all the action — except for Yahoo — lies. Yahoo, the website with the largest reach, according to Alexa’s data, goes all the way to the top of this chart, but the number two site is so much farther down that you can’t really distinguish Yahoo from the left-hand border of the chart — its line is basically synonymous with that left-hand border. After that, a few squiggles in the left-hand corner of the chart, rapidly descending. Then another line, of the remaining 99% or so of websites, which is, basically, synonymous with the bottom border of the chart.
Every webcomics site you’ve ever heard of, including except for the great and massive Penny-Arcade (Alexa rank 1573 as of today), is in that flat-dead line at the bottom of the chart.
So there’s some perspective. There are, of course, other perspectives. This is just one that isn’t often brought up.
[EDIT -- strikethrough "including" because I typed the exact opposite of what I meant to say]
November 15th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
As dramatic as that chart is, it only shows their top 200,000 out of 100 million or so websites …
November 15th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
True. If it showed 100 million websites (or however many million there really are), there would just be Yahoo and a flat-line.
November 15th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
Yeah, that’s my point, that the long tail is about 50 times longer than that chart suggests. The 100 million estimate is from
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/11/01/november_2006_web_server_survey.html
They’ve got nice charts and graphs there, too!
November 16th, 2006 at 1:30 am
He does acknowledge as much in his actual blogpost — the gloss on that is my fault. Though he also says that, after the 18millionth website, the traffic is too small to be measurable.
Still, if every website from the 18millionth spot to the 100millionth spot gets one reader a day, that’s 82 million people … and if it’s just 1 reader every other day, that’s 41 million.
Joey
http://www.webcomicsnation.com
November 16th, 2006 at 6:02 am
Great. A new webcomics brotherhood via obscurity!
November 16th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
Seeing as how I currently make my living building Flash Banners for Yahoo! I won’t complain. Now if I can only figure out a way to insert subliminal messages directing people to read my comics…
November 18th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
Chuck — I can help you with those subliminal messages.
December 14th, 2006 at 10:55 pm
That graph would be a lot more interesting if it had a log scale. The distribution of traffic is probably some kind of power-law distribution; on a log scale we could see which one.