Internet Traffic Is Condensing Around a Few Huge Sites

The nature of the Internet is always changing but a new extensive study from Arbor Networks shows that the web is becoming increasingly centered on a few massive sites that take up a disproportionate amount of traffic. Google sits at the very top, accounting for around six percent of all web traffic, and the top 30 web companies actually make up 30 percent of the overall Internet traffic.

“Saying the Internet has changed dramatically over the last five years is cliché – the Internet is always changing dramatically. However, over the course of the last five years, we’ve witnessed the start of an equally dramatic shift in the fundamental business of the Internet,” Craig Labovitz, chief scientist, Arbor Networks, said.

The study was conducted over the course of two years from April 2007 to April 2009 and gathered data from 110 large ISPs. Five years ago web traffic was somewhat evenly distributed across tens of thousands of hosting centers and servers around the world but most of the traffic has now shifted towards a few very large hosting services or content providers. Cloud services are also becoming increasingly popular.

HTTP traffic now accounts for 52 percent of the entire Internet traffic, up from 42 percent a couple of years ago. Email comes in at just 1.41 percent and video apps account for an additional 2.57 percent. Of the HTTP traffic though, video takes a huge chunk, anywhere between 25 percent and 40 percent. Peer-to-peer traffic on the other hand has apparently dropped off in the past two years and now accounts for just 18 percent of the worldwide traffic, down from 40 percent in 2007.

Interestingly, when it comes to actually carrying the traffic the trend is the other way around. Web traffic has moved from a few massive centralized Tier-1 providers towards lower-tier providers or directly to connections between big content providers or content delivery networks. This has prompted a move from the Tier-1 providers as well and they are now selling much more directly to enterprises or for VPNs.