Hacker News Reader

Comment by kawera | Hacker News Reader

...now hosts more than 20 million sites that are seen by 175 million visitors every month.

With all the caveats about average numbers, it seems that on average each site is visited by only 8 visitors per month. Are those numbers correct?

View on HN

It's dangerous to assume an even spread. Numbers are reported like this because the distribution of site visits is usually confidential information. From experience, I'd guess it's something like 1 million sites holding ~70% of the visitors, with the rest spread along the tail.

The distribution of links pointing to a Web site follows a power-law distribution (few sites get most of the links) [1].

It is very likely that the number of visits follow a similar power-law distribution.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/287/5461/2115.full

I'm pretty sure this is exactly what I just said.

Thanks. I didn't assume they were evenly spread but even if we make it 175M x 70% / 1M we still have only ~120 visitors per month.

Remember that probably majority of those sites are either dead, not public and made when some people were learning how to make sites. You can put that number probably down to 10% active/public sites. If visitor number is 175m this might be unique visitors to the platform = one visitor might visit multiple sites.

Yes but in this case it would be much better to cite the number of "active sites" and not an almost meaningless 20M figure. Still, it's hard to define "active sites".

Then the number would be lower... Its all about marketing. "Unlimited", "hundreds of millions", "probably most of" sounds better than "5% of resources", "20 million active", "there is no data but we think a lot".

This

You're still assuming an even spread amongst the ones that are in that 1M. My point is it's usually hard to tell, and you should assume very few sites hold most visitors. Just keep re-applying the concept (of the 1m, 1000 account for 70% etc).

These are small business sites, not content oriented sites (blogs, news sites, etc). If even 8 new people see your site per month and half turn into customers - that's not bad. Talking about a daycare, a tutor, a hardware shop, etc.

I would imagine the majority of the sites are not truly in use anyways: test sites, etc.

True. Out of the six or so I've made, only one actually gets used and updated regularly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com