Posted 07/10/09 at 04:30:01 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Microsoft has pinned all its hopes on Bing. Its latest take on internet search has got off to a reasonable start. Bing managed to workup a bit of hype and so far hasn’t really disappointed in terms of performance. Now, the numbers are pouring in and they are also more than passable. Stats from Compete.com for the month of June – Bing’s inaugural month – show that it wasted no time in becoming the 13th most visited website in the U.S with 49.57 million visitors. It also happened to breeze past behemoths like Digg, Twitter and CNN. However, the summit still isn't in sight.

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Posted 07/08/09 at 09:19:16 AM by Paul Lilly

If you watched Michael Jackson's memorial live online, you were far from alone in doing so. According to Akamai, more than 2,185,000 live and on-demand streams in both Flash and Windows Media formats recorded 3,924,370 visitors per minute as of 1PM EST, and more than 3.3 million visitors per minute overall.

Akamai says it was the second-largest day in terms of total traffic on its network. So what day claims the top spot? June 25th, when 4,247,971 global visitors per minute made a mad dash for news sites after reports started flooding in that the king of pop had passed on.

As one might expect, the influx of traffic caused a lot of rebuffering. The live streams served up more than 2 terabits per second during the memorial service held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, and Akamai says it delivered 548Gbps of live and on-demand Flash streams. Video stalls were particularly common in Asia, where the time spent waiting rather than watching reached as high as 40 percent, compared to 5 percent in the U.S.

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Posted 04/27/09 at 04:37:10 PM by Andy Salisbury

Earlier this month the traffic monitoring service comScore released their global numbers for March of 2009. And, with those results came some astonishing numbers for everyone’s favorite compulsive microblogging service, Twitter.

Twitter.com’s worldwide visitors increased a whopping 95 percent in March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million, according to the report. It’s expected that Ashton Kutcher’s race with CNN to one million followers and Oprah’s introduction were both large parts of the traffic increase.

It should be noted though, that this is only traffic on Twitter’s site, not an actual tally of active users. And it doesn’t track users that use the service by means of desktop or mobile client. All things considered, these are still some pretty impressive numbers.

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Posted 04/03/09 at 05:44:20 PM by Andy Salisbury

Sweden recently enforced a new anti-piracy policy that lets copyright holders quickly acquire the identity of major pirates and prosecute them directly through the courts, without any police intervention at all – and a many took notice.

According to Netnod, a Swedish web tracking firm, web traffic on the day the policy went into place dropped from 120GB/s to 80GB/s. But, the drop is likely temporary according to the VP of Sweden’s (I kid you not) Pirate Party, Christian Engstrom, who states, “Today, there is a very drastic reduction in internet traffic. But experience from other countries suggests that while file-sharing drops on the day a law is passed, it starts climbing again… One of the reasons is that it takes people a few weeks to figure out how to change their security settings so that can share files anonymously.”

Still, the law has been under fire due to its allowing major corporations to circumvent the police by means of direct lawsuits. Obtaining specific information is as easy as going to the uploader’s ISP, who will then get his IP and identity.

What do you think? Is it fair to let copyright holders protect their products at any cost, or is it the beginning of a long line of abuse from major corporations? Let us know after the jump.

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Posted 10/10/08 at 07:57:40 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Facebook is the most visited social network globally and Britain is no exception to this fact. The website is the second most popular website in the UK after Google UK, according to Hitwise. Its popularity in recent times can be gauged from the fact that it registered a staggering growth rate of 2905% from September 2006 to 2007. Of course, the website is probably never going to replicate its performance during that period – its halcyon days.  Its annual growth rate has come down to a more digestable level of 88%.

Its growth in the UK is certainly slowing down. There was only a 4% increase in its traffic between August and September, which is almost negligible compared to the 50% growth during the same period last year. Facebook’s average session time has also come down to 20 minutes.

Is there a message hidden in these numbers? Are social networking websites marching towards their popularity threshold?  Will there be a corrective decline in their traffic?

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Posted 10/09/08 at 10:49:43 AM by Paul Lilly

We would expect to see an increase in ammo, canned food, and other survival sales during the current economic downfall, but local Army Surplus stores aren't the only ones seeing increased traffic as of late. As the stock market continues to slide, people have begun spending more time on the web following the latest news on Wall Street and looking for financial advice.

According to internet tracker comScore, visits to GasBuddy.com, which helps consumers find the lowest fuel prices in their area, are up almost 30 percent. The tracker also expects statistics will show increased traffic to finance and bargain-hunter sites when tallied later this week.

"Investment pages are just red hot right now with people wanting to know what is going on with stocks," Yahoo Finance general manager Mark Interrrante told AFP. "We have been impressed by the traffic. People are not just diving down into stocks but asking what is going on, how it affects them and where it is all going."

Yahoo Finance message boards has seen its traffic jump by 40 percent, and Google searches for the term "stocks" has almost tripled in September. SavingAdvice.com reports "a significant amount of traffic," and self-help startup PeopleJam.com says it has seen interest in personal finance tips jump eightfold in the past month.

Hit the jump and tell us what sites you're visiting.

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Posted 09/04/08 at 07:21:59 PM by Pulkit Chandna

The popularity of streaming video has shot up exponentially in recent times, according to an article on ArsTechnica. And this growth has come at the expense of P2P traffic. British ISP PlusNet reported a 168% increase in streaming video traffic in the past one year; Youtube traffic now makes up 6.5% of all its network traffic.

Various streaming video services, and not just Youtube, have found favor among internet users in Britain and that has driven people away from P2P. Furthermore, according to PlusNet’s Dave Tomlinson, people are turning to streaming videos as they want to access content instantly.

All ISPs unequivocally despise P2P traffic and some have even devised clandestine methods to suppress it. There machinations against P2P are always wrapped in the puritanical garb of fighting piracy. Although streaming services are also used for propagating copyrighted content, the percentage of such unauthorized content is nothing compared to P2P. So ISPs might not have a moral pretext to combat streaming video, if it becomes as popular as P2P.

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Posted 06/25/08 at 06:54:23 PM by Pulkit Chandna

 A report by network equipment manufacturer Sandvine has once again saddled P2P traffic with the blame for hogging most of the precious North American bandwidth. The report pegs P2P traffic’s share of internet bandwidth at 44% - up 3% from the preceding year.

The scales are heavily lopsided as web traffic comes a distant second with 27.3% followed by streaming media with 14.8% of internet bandwidth.

VoIP is expected to grow steadily over the coming few years but it currently consumes the least internet bandwidth, a paltry .2%. Although there has been no consistency in reports detailing bandwidth usage, P2P traffic is logically most bandwidth-intensive.

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