The long tail is getting longer and thicker

While there are more and more web site with very little traffic, the number of medium-sized sites is growing rapidly.

Two years ago there were about 40-60,000 web sites with more than 100,000 monthly visits. Today there 150,000 such web sites.

Peteris Krumins has been blogging for six years now and he is kind enough to share some data with us every year. According to the Google Analytics based graph on his report from July 24, 2013, there were about 90-100,000 monthly visits to catonmat.netin the past few months.

If you look at the information Alexa shows about Catonmat.net, you will see it currently has a global rank of 149,889 (It also fell 30,920 positions in the last 3 months.)

You will also see a graph showing the position of the site in the global ranking for the past 2 years.

As the graph changes every day, I copied here the one I saw on July 25 2013::

This shows that during the second half of 2011, catonmat.net was mostly between positions 40-60,000.

If you look at the report of Peteris Krumins on the 5th anniversary of his site (July 14, 2012) you can see that in the second half of 2011 there were about 120,000 monthly visits. (except in December when he saw a sudden peak.)

So basically while the traffic of catonmat.net was only slightly smaller, (90K instead of 120K / month) its position fell from 40-60K to 150K.

Not only that, but according t Alexa, the web site lost 30K from its position in the last 3 months, while the Google Analytics graph show almost no change in the last 6 months. (The Alexa number is based on the "previous 3 months", so the number 3 month ago was based on traffic in the first 3 months of 2013.

So the long tail is getting longer, but there is also a rapidly growing number of sites with more than 100,000 visits/month.