1% of Domains Drive Over 70% of Referring Traffic | Hacker News Reader

1% of Domains Drive Over 70% of Referring Traffic

conductor.com

9 pointsstickhandle7 comments

So typical for those internet fat cats to hog up all the referrals! What about the rest of us in the 99% trying to make an honest living?

Working harder, producing better content ... still, MANY folks still have Yahoo, AOL or MSN as their homepage :-(. And of course, Google wants to be the web's only affiliate [http://www.seobook.com/brand-vs-affiliate-vs-spam], but will give a pass to "brands" (read: brands + cash = not spam), while labeling small sites as internet spam. Its all looking pretty dire for the common (wo)man. Business as usual, i guess.

The Internet used to be a social experiment. Now it is just a subset of economics.

The internet, for better or worse, is a winner takes all game within each vertical.

The corollary of this is that if you can't compete in your current vertical you choose a more restricted vertical and try to be one of the fat cats within that.

Organic search drives 7 out of 10 visits?

I'm a little skeptical of that statistic.

I wish Outbrain had updated reports that I could use (I wasn't able to find any;) however, pulling from an older study from 2011, they reported Search and Social numbers that seem very different than what Conductor's study dictates. Search was at 40% and Social was at 14% for their top 150 Publishers at the time. [1] If search more than doubled in 18 months, there would be quite a bit of coverage on such a substantial gain. I've had my head down to work for a while, so maybe I missed the undoubted hype that would have surrounded such a gain?

I do believe the idea that the 'fat head' drives the majority of traffic. I'm simply questioning the accuracy of the breakdown of referring traffic sources.

[1] http://www.outbrain.com/blog/2011/08/content-sites-refer-tra...

This is a simple case of default settings. Not much has changed over the years. He who controls the operating system/browser controls the portal and hence the referral.

As well-known and popular as Google is as a portal, they still need to play the default settings game. Android and Chrome are Google's way of making sure google.tld is a default setting.

One could argue that in the majority of cases, those 1% of domains are not chosen by the user, but by he who controls th default settings.

Anecdotal takeaway -- "The Referrer Fat Head is Alive and Well"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com