I was reading through the usual stuff this morning and hit this about a TechCrunch post that

ended up at the Yahoo front page, which leads to around 300,000 clicks per second. That’s a crap load of users.

Yes, it is. Or would be if it were true.

Do Some Numbers

I always like to run the numbers up and down until I get something I can comprehend. I look at Alexa a lot for that - and yes, I know it is imperfect.

Alexa says that yahoo.com got 45,000,000,000 (yes, 45B!) page views last month. Holy moses, did I do that math right?

Alexa also says that google.com got 26,000,000,000 (26B when it's home alone) which is in the same ballpark, but who would have thought yahoo would have more traffic than google?

Wait, there are more numbers.

3% of the yahoo traffic went to the homepage - 1.35B page views.

16% of google's traffic went to their homepage - 17B page views.

Ok, that starts to sound like I understand the world.

(Side note, 20B mail.yahoo.com vs. 3.6B mail.google.com page views. Hmm.)

Drilling Down Into the Numbers

Ok, back to the 300K clicks/second thought experiment. If Alexa is right and 3% of yahoo traffic goes to yahoo.com and another 3% to news.yahoo.com then we have 2.7B page loads/month.

There are (30 days * 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds/hour) = 2.9M seconds/month. (Or you could google "seconds in a month!")

So, 2.7B page loads/month works out to around 1K/second for the home page and the news page.

I Call BS on TechCrunch Math

I dunno, if he'd said 300 clicks/second (which is non trivial!) I'd still have been impressed.

Now, did the story stay on the front page for an hour? That is 18K visitors, which is pretty impressive. Not 300K but still.

Don Is Smarter Than I Am

I asked Don to review my math and he pointed out that I just went the long way around the barn. If Yahoo could send 300K clicks in a second then that works out to 25B/day.

Another way to think about that: everyone in the world has to click on that story. Five times.

Compare Yahoo to 55,000 Digg Hit

I have this article on digg bookmarked because it is so well written and thoughtfully analyzes digg traffic, secondary spikes, etc.

And over a 4 day period he got 55,000 visitors from digg. He compares that surge to an earlier one where he got 0ver 40,000 visitors from digg.

How hard it is to get to the front page of digg versus yahoo news?  Easier, I think. 

Conclusion?

One thing we know is that digg sends traffic (a trickle, but still) forever on stories that get good vote volume. And you do get good feed additions too.

Now, if someone told me that Yahoo sent as many feed-friendly folks as digg I'd belive them, at least provisionally. But once the story is off the Buzz page I would be shocked if you continue to get traffic.

I'd love to opine on link love, but I don't have anything to base my opinion on. I know that is shocking on the internet, but there you go.

I started looking at this article to make sure my BS-O-Meter wasn't defective (it wasn't) but along the way I started to think about the relative size of social media "waves."