

1% of Domains Drive Over 70% of Referring Traffic - stickhandle
http://www.conductor.com/blog/2012/12/surprise-only-1-of-domains-drive-over-70-of-referring-traffic-data/

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therealarmen
So typical for those internet fat cats to hog up all the referrals! What about
the rest of us in the 99% trying to make an honest living?

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stickhandle
Working harder, producing better content ... still, MANY folks still have
Yahoo, AOL or MSN as their homepage :-(. And of course, Google wants to be the
web's only affiliate [<http://www.seobook.com/brand-vs-affiliate-vs-spam>],
but will give a pass to "brands" (read: brands + cash = not spam), while
labeling small sites as internet spam. Its all looking pretty dire for the
common (wo)man. Business as usual, i guess.

~~~
IheartApplesDix
The Internet used to be a social experiment. Now it is just a subset of
economics.

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jameszol
Organic search drives 7 out of 10 visits?

I'm a little skeptical of that statistic.

I wish Outbrain had updated reports that I could use (I wasn't able to find
any;) however, pulling from an older study from 2011, they reported Search and
Social numbers that seem very different than what Conductor's study dictates.
Search was at 40% and Social was at 14% for their top 150 Publishers at the
time. [1] If search more than doubled in 18 months, there would be quite a bit
of coverage on such a substantial gain. I've had my head down to work for a
while, so maybe I missed the undoubted hype that would have surrounded such a
gain?

I do believe the idea that the 'fat head' drives the majority of traffic. I'm
simply questioning the accuracy of the breakdown of referring traffic sources.

[1] [http://www.outbrain.com/blog/2011/08/content-sites-refer-
tra...](http://www.outbrain.com/blog/2011/08/content-sites-refer-traffic-
other-content-pages-googles-share-drops.html)

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jp--1
This is a simple case of default settings. Not much has changed over the
years. He who controls the operating system/browser controls the portal and
hence the referral.

As well-known and popular as Google is as a portal, they still need to play
the default settings game. Android and Chrome are Google's way of making sure
google.tld is a default setting.

One could argue that in the majority of cases, those 1% of domains are not
chosen by the user, but by he who controls th default settings.

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stickhandle
Anecdotal takeaway -- "The Referrer Fat Head is Alive and Well"

