The Longtail

Royal Pingdom has a very interesting article released today about the longtail of the Internet and the relative unique visits traffic. They only collected data from the top 1,000 websites (Google and its propoerties are omitted because the data collected is based on Google's data and they do not release information regarding their own websites) but it is fascinating to see. Mostly because the dichotomy of the top ten and the rest of the Internet.

Here is some data from the article:

* To become a top 1,000 website you need at least 4.1 million visitors per month.

* To become a top 500 website you need at least 7.4 million visitors per month.

* To become a top 100 website you need at least 22 million visitors per month.

* To become a top 50 website you need at least 41 million visitors per month.

* To become a top 10 website you need at least 230 million visitors per month.

* To become the number 1 website in the world? Then you need more than 540 million visitors per month.

This is unique visitors as well. This is truly amazing. A website in the top 1,000 will have less than 1% of the traffic of the most popular website. Obviously, it should be noted that traffic reporting on the Internet is notoriously difficult and I don't quite believe any service offers a 100% accurate count, but the numbers speak for themselves.

How does this relate to myhomepage? Well, one of the goals for myhomepage is to directly address the longtail. There are millions of websites on the web - more than you would ever be able to visit in a life time (a lot you might rightly not want to visit). We have also visited websites that we will never visit again but there are a lot of websites that we seldom visit but often try to find again some time later. With myhomepage, you have the option of bookmarking these very websites! Similarly, a lot of time is spent re-registering for a website you have already registered for, simply because you cannot remember your login details. With myhomepage, you can easily save your username and password for the site. So, if you do want to visit that website again, you can easily find it in your myhomepage account and also log into it with minimal hassle and annoyance!