Quarterly Journal of Electronic Commerce, 1 (2000), p. 5-12.
Lada A. Adamic and Bernardo A. Huberman
Abstract
We studied the statistics in the number of visitors to sites of the
World Wide Web by examining usage logs covering one hundred and twenty
thousand sites. We found out that both in the case of all sites and sites
in specific categories, the distribution of visitors per site follows a
universal power law, characteristic of winner-take-all markets. We developed
a dynamical theory of site popularity which takes into account the stochastic
nature of user decisions to visit given sites as well as the fact that
newer sites are appearing at an ever increasing rate. The model accounts
for the observed power law behavior and naturally provides the amplification
factor responsible for the increased performance of the top performers.
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