Slashdot Mirror

• Plus, they HAVE done new things, such as google news.

Along those lines, for other cave dwellers - after emerging from one's cave:
Don't look directly at the sun.
Definitely, don't look at IA with all the really old blinking text embarassing personal shit on it nor should one use the Alexa Tool Bar

But under 10% of Yahoo's traffic goes to their search sections: Again, Alexa.

But under 10% of Yahoo's traffic goes to their search sections: Again, Alexa.

According to alexa.com, google is the 3rd most visited site in the world.

And compared to google, slashdot is but a drop in the bucket.

For those too lazy to find out, the #1 site is Yahoo.com, #2 is MSN. List

According to alexa.com, google is the 3rd most visited site in the world.

And compared to google, slashdot is but a drop in the bucket.

For those too lazy to find out, the #1 site is Yahoo.com, #2 is MSN. List

According to alexa.com, google is the 3rd most visited site in the world.

And compared to google, slashdot is but a drop in the bucket.

For those too lazy to find out, the #1 site is Yahoo.com, #2 is MSN. List

Interesting, but I don't know how much it being English-only actually matters, seeing that in Alexa global Top 500 over half of the Top 100 sites are in Asian language, either Korean, Japanese or Chinese.

This is sort of sad. Gator.com is in the top 10 most visited websites. *sigh*

I can't wait until I can get Internet2 access.

Cool, I didn't know that "compare" feature. Here's the graph comparing slashdot and wikipedia over 1 year. See how much wikipedia traffic increased?

Slashdot

Slashdot effect

Slashdot trolling phenomena

Another interesting point of note:

According to Alexa (which is not always reliable), Wikipedia.org is now more popular than Slashdot.org.

Before we could learn to pronounce it, it was shut down. It's not that the servers are melting with the rapid rise to ~3 million page views or 500th most popular site in a couple of days. It's not a conspiracy of data collection or a learning curve. orkut, which should really be named Oogle, demonstrated that a high performance explicit social networking site, well designed for digital immeadiate gratification (one local engineer personally even complained they had to click from map to profile to add a friend), supported by brand and with the right root can unleash latent demand. I would say this is reflective of the dearth of social capital in our society, but aside from such heady stuff, frictionless whuffie fun, huh? Latent demand for what is the question. Internet researchers would die excruciating deaths in search of the last days of data. I would venture a guess that most of the digerati that was already pre-conditions by existing services, an incomprehensible demographic that grants hypergrowth to the best, grants the best feedback, but easily taketh away. okurt doesn't work because it lacks constraints. Nothing hold people back. Nobody knows what a friend means. No social capital on the line. Its so fun and easy, choices and incentives are irrational. Normally this would raise questions. Some constraints make good social compact. Some constraints on openness curb pollution (spam, security). One of the better constraints is price because it lead to profit. However, AdSense is relatively frictionless. It adds new constraints while adding value. Same could be said for other well targeted forms of content, like blog posts...

Yeah, and those damn nuns... and orphanages!

No but seriously, do you know what a apple is? How about a orange? How do they compare? Because that's what you're comparing.

Wikipedia is a far cry from doctors who provide emergency aid to war victims.

Wikipedia is one of the top 1000 sites on the internet. Want to guess how many of those sites aren't selling something or selling ads? Try less than 1%. So what would happen if every site currently running ads decided "hey, we shouldn't run ads, we should just beg for $$$!". Internet would be a pretty shitty place to surf.

It's like TV: wouldn't TV just suck if instead of commercials you had some corporate exec standing there begging for donations? What's that you say? PBS already does that crap? Exactly, and no one likes it.

Course none of this matters because Wikipedia made 20 grand in 1 day so apparently there's a lot of people out there that don't mind Paypal sucking their bank accounts dry so whatever.

Perhaps this link will help to illustrate how your pathetic little site compares to wikipedia in terms of traffic.

How come you people always babble most about things you really don't know a bit about?

And by the way, do your google searches mostly consist on finding more sleazy pr0n sites to advertise on your "free" piece of garbage? That's probably one area wikipedia doesn't cater to. Try finding some information next time and you'll begin to see those links.

Can't say for sure if it'll even out soon or keep growing.

Well, Slashdot is number 867 so Wikipedia still has a ways to go. Also consider that Alexa only counts alexa toolbar users, and the alexa toolbar is only available for English-speaking Internet Explorer users, which may skew the results. (I imagine Wikipedia gets more non-English traffic while Slashdot gets more non-Internet Explorer traffic)

I am assuming one of the sites you are referring to would be the one you put at the end of your post? If thats the case you really need a reality check, you don't even come close to wikipedia or slashdot... Not to undermine the size of your site or anything, but you are not the big dog you think you are. You are comparing 2 3 digit ranked sites to 2 of your 6 digit ranked sites.

snowjournal.com vs wikipedia.org

skimaps.com vs wikipedia.org

Maybe this will put it a little more in perspective for you:
sun.com vs wikipedia.org

I am assuming one of the sites you are referring to would be the one you put at the end of your post? If thats the case you really need a reality check, you don't even come close to wikipedia or slashdot... Not to undermine the size of your site or anything, but you are not the big dog you think you are. You are comparing 2 3 digit ranked sites to 2 of your 6 digit ranked sites.

snowjournal.com vs wikipedia.org

skimaps.com vs wikipedia.org

Maybe this will put it a little more in perspective for you:
sun.com vs wikipedia.org

I am assuming one of the sites you are referring to would be the one you put at the end of your post? If thats the case you really need a reality check, you don't even come close to wikipedia or slashdot... Not to undermine the size of your site or anything, but you are not the big dog you think you are. You are comparing 2 3 digit ranked sites to 2 of your 6 digit ranked sites.

snowjournal.com vs wikipedia.org

skimaps.com vs wikipedia.org

Maybe this will put it a little more in perspective for you:
sun.com vs wikipedia.org

According to alexa wikipedia's traffic is around the same as Slashdot's. But traffic and connectivity is not a problem at all.

The problem is that wikipedia needs backup webservers (relatively cheap) and a backup db server (not cheap).

z.

Wikipedia is, according to alexa, within the top 1000 trafficked domains in the web.

Yes, we're about even in traffic with slashdot these days.

# awk '{print $1}' /usr/local/apache2/logs/pol_log |grep "28/Dec"|sort -r|uniq|wc -l
45105

Files served for the day 153764.... My bandwidth usage is scary. Man... just these two domains, would in theory, be enough for me to want a 20k machine too. Hell that doesn't include the spoofs I do like Scumgroup.com, Shafted.Us, and a crapload of other sites I have lurking around, AntiOffline.com, and I forget the others.

Traffic Rank for politrix.org: 703,455
Traffic Rank for clubxxxxxxxxx: 66,649
Traffic Rank for wikimedia.org: 692,781

So like I said... 20k is a lot of money for a personal machine. And MIND YOU I don't have any ads, sales, etc., on the site. I may put up tshirts, ONCE IN A BLUE ASS MOON, then take the revenue and send out those same assed t's to friends, or order some for myself.

Maybe he just needs better admins or something if his equipment keeps getting bonked out.

# awk '{print $1}' /usr/local/apache2/logs/pol_log |grep "28/Dec"|sort -r|uniq|wc -l
45105

Files served for the day 153764.... My bandwidth usage is scary. Man... just these two domains, would in theory, be enough for me to want a 20k machine too. Hell that doesn't include the spoofs I do like Scumgroup.com, Shafted.Us, and a crapload of other sites I have lurking around, AntiOffline.com, and I forget the others.

Traffic Rank for politrix.org: 703,455
Traffic Rank for clubxxxxxxxxx: 66,649
Traffic Rank for wikimedia.org: 692,781

So like I said... 20k is a lot of money for a personal machine. And MIND YOU I don't have any ads, sales, etc., on the site. I may put up tshirts, ONCE IN A BLUE ASS MOON, then take the revenue and send out those same assed t's to friends, or order some for myself.

Maybe he just needs better admins or something if his equipment keeps getting bonked out.

Yep, that was my hack, #58 (Competitive Data with Java). I decided to collect all of the data and save it to an RSS feed. That way other people within your company can take a look at how your domain, and even its subdomains, competes with the competition over time. Since Alexa's Traffic Detail page displays the traffic from its toolbar users, your comparisons are only as good as the limited user base.

Yep, that was my hack, #58 (Competitive Data with Java). I decided to collect all of the data and save it to an RSS feed. That way other people within your company can take a look at how your domain, and even its subdomains, competes with the competition over time. Since Alexa's Traffic Detail page displays the traffic from its toolbar users, your comparisons are only as good as the limited user base.

I guess I don't care about mainstream anymore, I think mainstream will eventually be replaced with the likes of Slashdot, The Inquirer, Drudge Report, and Google Tech. Let us see how long it takes for my prediction to come true we can check the progress here.

Last time this issue came up, I ran a check based on Alexa's top site listings, and Netcraft's assessment of what these sites were running.

Results. Of the top 100 English language sites, there were: 44 GNU/Linux, 25 Microsoft Windows (NT, 2K, XP, 2K3), 13 Sun Solaris 8, 7 Sun Solaris, 4 unknown OS, 4 FreeBSD, 1 Sun Solaris 9, 1 Apple MacOSX, and 1 HP-UX operating systems.

Webservers were: 43 Apache, 26 Microsoft-IIS, 13 Netscape-Enterprise, 3 GWS, 3 AOLserver, 2 Zeus, 1 unknown, 1 thttpd, 1 Stronghold, 1 Squeegit, 1 Roxen, 1 Resin, 1 Rediff, 1 Bellsouth PWP server, 1 AV, and 1 Apache Tomcat.

If you like tabular layouts and want to see methods and scripts (Slashdot's crapfilter prevents this), look here.

Point: for high-volume sites, Linux or FreeBSD and Apache are preferred 2:1 over Microsoft solutions.

From our point of view, the list and the focus is vital to any good Web server survey. Netcraft's list is wide, and their highlighted conclusions are not qualified by their own methdology. Netcraft highlights the Apache/IIS divide and usually their uncorrected figures because that will help them sell more Web site data -- to corporate customers.

Port80 is in the business of making tools for IIS. True. And Port80's survey does highlight an area that MS is winning in: corporate Web servers of the Fortune 1000. I would hazard to guess that MS and IIS are also winning in another area of interest: the corporate extranet and intranet market. But there are many surveys out there:

http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200310/ index.html

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500

Each one makes different assumptions and has a different slant. The perfect Web server survey has yet to be attained, and the important point I think is that we are here, having this debate. Port80 plans to expland its surveys to different lists: more international lists, lists of qualified high traffic sites, and more. We will keep putting up the data and insighting debate.

As for Port80 Software and the Microsoft connection, remember that we are old open source advocates from way back. Port80's best ideas for improving the IIS Web server evolve from what has been accomplished with Apache and the mods culture of continuous tinkering, improvement and exploration.

Happy Turkey Day,

Chris @ Port80

Their methodology sucks as well, though. I would venture the guess that a large proportion of those 1000 websites they sampled are just "brochure"-type websites. (Like eg. apache corporation)

So I decided to do __..--Sascha's Server Survey--..__:

I checked out the servers that the top 50 alexa ranked pages run. (Yes, I am too lazy to do the whole hundred)

Results:

apache: 20
iis: 17
nescape/aol: 7
other/unknown: 7

An interresting observation is the difference between the first 25 and the second 25 bunch. The first bunch includes all those microsoft sites that all the lusrs visit: msn.com, microsoft.com, passport.net, doubleclick.com.

First 25:

iis: 11
apache: 8
netscape/aol: 3
other/unknown: 3

Second 25:

apache: 12
iis: 6
netscape/aol: 3
other/unknown: 4

My intuition is that the majority of websites are going to be more like the second segment, because of the lack of monopoly distortion (i.e. default IE website).

Sign up now for only $666, and get the full results of this superb survey.

Good point. So I ran some numbers for the top 100 English, and top 500 global, sites identified by Alexa

After collecting the list of sites, I ran them through the Netcraft What's That Site Running query page.

I normalized OS for all Windows systems, and trimmed the variants for webservers.

Results (partial as Netcraft query is still running):

Top 100 English Language Sites - OS

Total sites: 100

44 GNU/Linux | 25 Microsoft Windows (NT, 2K, XP, 2K3) | 13 Sun Solaris 8 | 7 Sun Solaris | 4 unknown operating system | 4 FreeBSD | 1 Sun Solaris 9 | 1 Apple MacOSX | 1 HP-UX

Top 100 English Language Sites - Webserver

Total sites: 100

43 Apache | 26 Microsoft-IIS | 13 Netscape-Enterprise | 3 GWS | 3 AOLserver | 2 Zeus | 1 unknown | 1 thttpd | 1 Stronghold | 1 Squeegit | 1 Roxen | 1 Resin | 1 Rediff | 1 Bellsouth PWP server V1.0(4) | 1 AV | 1 Apache Tomcat

Top 500 Global Sites - OS

Total sites: 418

154 GNU/Linux | 101 Microsoft Windows (NT, 2K, XP, 2K3) | 43 Sun Solaris | 30 FreeBSD | 27 Sun Solaris 8 | 25 unknown | 3 Solaris 9 | 3 IBM AIX | 2 NetApp NetCache | 2 Compaq Tru64 | 1 Apple MacOSX | 1 HP-UX

Top 500 Global Sites - Webserver

Total sites: 421

177 Apache | 111 Microsoft-IIS | 43 Netscape-Enterprise | 12 GWS | 8 Zeus | 6 unknown | 4 thttpd | 4 Stronghold | 3 Resin | 3 AOLserver | 2 IBM_HTTP_SERVER | 2 AV | 2 Apache Tomcat | 2 Apache Coyote | 2 Apache-AdvancedExtranetServer | 1 Y.G.Apache-SSLv3 | 1 Virgilio (c) WebServer | 1 .V08 Apache | 1 T-httpd | 1 Squeegit | 1 Roxen | 1 Rediff | 1 Oracle9iAS (1.0.2.2) Containers for J2EE | 1 Jetty | 1 IIS | 1 IBM_HTTP_Server | 1 Bellsouth PWP server V1.0(4) | 1 AkamaiGHost

I would have posted a nicely formatted quasi-tabular post, but Slash is dinking me for short lines and syntactic sugar. So you get pipe-delimited. Bitch to Malda.

Hm, I hadn't considered hotmail. It does appear to be the majority of msn.com traffic. hotmail.msn.com is visited by 76% of all visitors to *.msn.com). Search.msn.com is only visited by 7% of visitors to msn.com. That still gives it over 10 times more monthly visitors than Slashdot. I find it hard to believe that that many people would choose search.msn.com over google voluntarily. They just use it because it's the default or because they typed an address wrong and IE sends them there automatically to get more ad exposures (it's almost worse than Verisign's SiteFinder).

Oh, there must be another reason msn.com is the second most visited site on the Internet, above Google. Must be their wonderful, uncluttered, advertising-free portal site that everyone loves, and the accurate, unbiased search tool. NOT. MSN's integration with Windows is the only reason it's the second most visited site on the Internet. I think Google and Yahoo should start another antitrust suit. This is a classic example of Microsoft abusing its monopoly position to extend its reach into other business areas. I don't see how they could possibly lose.

They want the traffic that Sitefinder brought in, as shown here on Alexa.

No price is given. Presumably, if you need to ask, you can't afford it...

I guess it only make sense to build a decent front end to the alexa archive, they claim it's huge.

Alexa Review

Give them negative reply!!

If you check out Verisigns traffic page at Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details ?q=&url=http://www.verisign.com), you can see why they aren't easily giving up their sitefinder project.

Check out Alexa and their graph about VeriSign's jump... 1,920% jump in a day (also look at their rating, lol).

These guys have always been sneaky. Remember when they sent out the "nameless" re-register postcards? I guess scum never changes....

Check out Alexa and their graph about VeriSign's jump... 1,920% jump in a day (also look at their rating, lol).

These guys have always been sneaky. Remember when they sent out the "nameless" re-register postcards? I guess scum never changes....

Hmm...looks like SiteFinder is already one of the most visited sites on the Internet!

2,268th most visit site on the web according to Alexa -- gotta love CPM advertising.

Hmm...looks like SiteFinder is already one of the most visited sites on the Internet!

2,268th most visit site on the web according to Alexa -- gotta love CPM advertising.

at alexa.com, also some bittorrent links for the above article.

For example, you take a look at the highest trafficked sites. Not surprisingly, the top sites are yahoo and MSN... but somewhere around #3 you get a Korean site and from there on down you get a pretty solid representation between sites that are primarily American, Korean and Japanese.

In Yahoo and other search engines (but not Google, that I've seen), you often get a "click-through" that goes to their system before transparently redirecting to the actual URL you clicked. This is relevance feedback. It's true that the system can't determine whether you LIKED the site (aka, whether it was "relevant"), but at least it's some sort of feedback the system can use to tune.

The other most familiar type of system I can think of is Alexa (now owned by Amazon.com, and the brainchild of the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle). With Alexa, they could count not just that you visited a site, but how long you spent and where else you went. This is at least part of the basis for Amazon's recommendation system for books and other geegaws they sell.

Can this work in a search engine? Yes, certainly. Does it mean that a search engine that implements relevance feedback will instantly be better than Google? Definitely not! There are many other things (about 20, from what I've heard) that go in to the ranking system that Google uses...Pagerank is one of them, but there are many other factors (such as term frequency, document HTML structure, etc.). Some these, notably Pagerank, work poorly on relatively small collections (in the TREC conference, people have almost never found that Pagerank, HITS or similar algorithmns improve performance with "only" a few tens of GB of Web documents -- a few million pages).

Wanna know more about information retrieval? The TREC page above is very good for state-of-the-art research reports (see the Publications area -- it's all online and free). More general texts are mostly in libraries, but one good one online is Managing Gigabytes, which covers the IR aspects thoroughly and also has lots of ideas about how to use compression in an IR system (something that I'm curious whether Google & others do).

For example, when you visit ZoneEdit, a self-funded, but popular website, you get a link to UltraDNS - a well-funded, but less popular company.

Allowing advertising on competitor's sites is more than unfair, it's evil. Why would decent-seeming companies like Google and Amazon would associate themselves with Alexa?

For example, when you visit ZoneEdit, a self-funded, but popular website, you get a link to UltraDNS - a well-funded, but less popular company.

Allowing advertising on competitor's sites is more than unfair, it's evil. Why would decent-seeming companies like Google and Amazon would associate themselves with Alexa?

If your site is already running, monitor it's ranking on Alexa [alexa.com] and see where you stad.

Wow, Alexa has come a long way since I last saw them.

I really question the quality of some of this infomation. Their measure of "Page views", "hits" only comes from people who install the Alexa Toolbar. Spyware anyone?

Funny you should ask this question as just today I got a love-not from my main avertising broker saying they wern't going to pay me as much anymore.

Anyway, I'm reminded of something someone else once told me on this front: "making money on a web site is easy; doing it without pissing off your users is hard.", and that's the truth.

Web advertising is harder then ever, at least from a publishers perspective; the breadth of sites and users that are around now make it hard to command any great sum from advertisers; Even popup ads, the little darlings of the IAB, seldom pay more than $2 per thousand.

To make a living like, say, Slashdot you either need to be lucky enough to sign on with a large advertising death floatilla (tribalfusion, 247realmedia, etc) or hire an avertising broker/PR agent to sell your site to advertisiers; These sign-up-on-a-web-page dealies sound good and by and large are goods but don't scale well when it comes to paying $1500 a month in expenses not including money for you to live on. They are good for making a little on the side, not for financing a lifestyle.

You asked "How much can a moderately popular site expect to earn from advertising revenue?". The answer as I've seen it is, unless you have a very, very, very tight demographic, the answer is not much. If your site is already running, monitor it's ranking on Alexa and see where you stand. Also, how do you define "moderately popular"? The answer varries widely depending on who you ask: A little while ago when I was lookign for advertisers, Advertising.com wouldn't even talk to me unless I had a 100,000 pageviews a day, and they consider that a "small site".

I guess what I'm trying to say is unless you have huge readership, you'll need some sort of specialized demographic (read: gimmick) to attract users and advertisers.

Also, remember that income is net: today being USA tax day and all you need to remember that you've gotta pay taxes on your monies, too, and that takes a big piece out.

If you're hell bent on doing this for a living you need to get lucky and cheat to win. Let's pick on Slashdot some more, shall we? Contrary to popular belief, it did not get popular based on those early Nude photos of Pater: it got popular largely based on riding the popularity wave of Linux and the Open Source zeitgeist. If you can find something similar, something that you can tune into, you'll stand a fighting chance.

Actually, I have no idea what I'm saying, I'm just rambling.