Is there a lot of traffic on the fourth of july?

What is a lot of traffic?

• I'd like to ask "What exactly is considered a lot of traffic for a website?" What's the minimum someone could say - after stating their website receives a lot of traffic - as to not be laughed at? Inspired by http://stackoverflow.com/questions/647210/just-what-is-a-big-database on stack overflow

• Answer:

  I've created the following scale to help give some feel of what "a lot" might mean. It uses estimates of unique monthly visitors for popular websites to create a high point, then works down from there. The "what's a lot of traffic?" scale (monthly uniques): "A right royal load" = 1 billion+ e.g. Google "A mother load" = 500 million+ e.g. Facebook "A crap load" = 100 million+ e.g. Wikipedia "A boat load" = 10 million+ e.g. News sites, StackExchange "A lot" = 1 million+ e.g. Very popular blogs, Web shops "Quite a lot" = 100,000+ e.g. Popular blogs "Small fish" = 0 - 100,000 e.g. Your mate Dave's tumblog Examples below based on collected data points of varying accuracy and usefulness: 1 billion unique monthly visitors (a right royal load) Google's estimated monthly unique visitor count is around a billion, as reported by the Wall Street Journal http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/06/21/google-notches-one-billion-unique-visitors-per-month/ in June 2011, based on comScore's estimates. 714 million unique monthly visitors (a mother load) Facebook's monthly visitors are almost as high as Google's, according to the same http://www.comscoredatamine.com/2011/06/google-reaches-1-billion-global-visitors/ that the Wall Street Journal cited. 400 million unique monthly visitors (a crap load) The Wikimedia foundation http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/ around 400 million monthly uniques for all Wikimedia sites worldwide (e.g. Wikipedia). 46 million unique monthly visitors (a boat load) A popular news site, such as the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/advertising/display-audience-guardian-traffic-users its monthly unique browser count at about 46 million. This is in line with other large news websites: The Huffington Post reported 36.6 million uniques and the The New York Times reported 35.5 million uniques, both from the US alone [http://mashable.com/2011/06/09/huffington-post-surpasses-new-york-times/]. 20 million unique monthly visitors (a boat load) A popular Q&A family of sites, such as the StackExchange network, sees around 20 million uniques per month, according to http://www.usv.com/2011/03/stack-overflow-becomes-stack-exchange.php in March 2011. 8 million unique monthly vistors (a lot) A popular shopping site such as http://asos.com has around http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASOS.com. That's still a lot. 5 million unique monthly visitors (a lot) A very popular blog, such as Matthew Inman's http://TheOatmeal.com receives around http://theoatmeal.com/ monthly unique visitors. More than 100,000 unique monthly visitors (quite a lot) Popular and moderately famous blogs and sites live in this band. (Anecdotal data point: I used to run a small popular blog that got about this amount of traffic. It's a healthy amount of traffic to have. It's also about the number of monthly uniques you need to make AdSense/ad units worthwhile, in my opinion.) Fewer than 100,000 unique monthly visitors (small fish) Everything else—hobbyist blogs and websites—fall here. Notes "A lot" is a relative term, so it's important to note that the scale above is only a very loose guideline. Many webmasters would be perfectly happy with a few thousand uniques a month for a personal blog, for example, and may well deem that "a lot". It depends entirely on the context, the competition, and the extent to which your own sense of achievement is inflated by lots of zeros. Still, it's fun to see how far the scale reaches.