Examples for: Winners don't take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web
Home page     David Pennock, Gary Flake, Steve Lawrence, Eric Glover, C. Lee Giles

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Contact: Dr. David Pennock, .

"Power law" distributions

Research has shown that the distribution of links to all sites on the web approximates a "power law", that is, a small number of sites receive the majority of links and most sites receive very few links.

The following plots show the distribution of inlinks to 100,000 random web pages. The first plot below shows the distribution with regular linear scales on each axis. The x-axis represents the number of inlinks to a site, and the y-axis represents the number of sites that have this many inlinks. Many sites have a very small number of inlinks, while very few sites have a large number of inlinks.


In the following plot the x-axis is plotted on a log scale, this makes it easier to see the detail of the distribution.


Typically, power law distributions are plotted using log scales for both the x and y axes, in which case a pure power law becomes a straight line. The distribution across all web pages is close to a pure power law, but deviates slightly. Notice the dropoff from a straight line at the top left of the following plot.


In our examples below, we use log scales for both axes which makes it easier to see the distributions.

Publications e-commerce sites (very competitive)

The following plot shows the observed distribution and model fit for the publications e-commerce category (books, magazines, etc.), which is the most competitive (most like a power law or preferential growth) category examined. The rightmost point is for Amazon.com. Note that the log scales on the plot compress the differences. The typical site in the publications e-commerce category has about 2 millionths the number of inlinks that Amazon.com has. It is interesting to compare the competition between online businesses to that of offline businesses - the largest market share online (for Amazon) is much greater than the largest market share offline.

By "more competitive", we mean that competition is tougher - it's harder to compete with existing popular sites (as opposed to a different definition where a category with fewer major competitors is considered less competitive in economic terms). Note that more difficulty competing with existing popular sites does not mean that substantially better newcomers cannot become popular quickly (cf. Google).

Photographers e-commerce sites (much less competitive)

The following plot shows the observed distribution and model fit for the photographers e-commerce category, which is the least competitive (most like uniform growth) category examined. There are multiple factors that can lead to the differences in competition that we see. For photographers, one likely factor is their local nature - photographers typically serve only a local community and those serving different areas usually do not compete. Another factor may be that people looking for photographers use methods other than the web more often (e.g., referrals from friends). Perhaps because people typically use professional photographers rarely, they are also less likely to create and share information among related sites on the web.

All categories

The following plots show the distributions for all of the examined e-commerce categories, in order from the most competitive category, to the least competitive category. Note that all of the plots differ substantially from the distribution for all web pages shown at the top of this page, and that the distribution changes substantially across the categories.


Download the study in HTML, PDF, or PostScript formats.
Contact: Dr. David Pennock, .