Social Machinery

For most of us the perception of Internet traffic as a fragmented collection of websites, similar to the long tail of content available is a fairly good representation.

But according to a latest reports from Arbor Network there is a consolidation happening. In that sense, 6% of world’s traffic is related to Google sites, becoming the company that receives more traffic in the globe.

Arbor analyzed 256 exabytes of browsing data collected during two years time. The study also showed that 30% of all traffic is related to only 30 sites. Among these sites you can find Facebook, Youtube, Microsoft, Wikipedia.

This is a quite astonishing consolidation, having in consideration the hundreds of millions sites out there. According to Arbor, Internet is entering a consolidation phase where big players like Google own a big amount of small sites that drive most of the traffic around the globe. Another interesting fact is that streaming traffic is growing faster compared to P2P.

Peer-to-peer traffic has been affected by a sharp decline representing only 18% of total traffic which only two years prior peaked at 40% of all traffic worldwide. One of the reasons that explain this dramatic change of consumers from P2P services like Napster, limewire to streaming repositories like Hulu, Youtube has been the easiness to get the same content without the hassle of downloading it.

As broadband duplicates its speed every 18 months and streaming service sites increase the amount of material and the user experience, consumers have begun to shift away of P2P

Link: Google Accounts for 6% of All Internet Traffic (The New York Times)