It Takes 22 Million Visitors to Become a Top 100 Website

Seeing Facebook adding tens of millions of new users every few months and even sites like Twitter getting close to two hundred million visitors, several times more than what it had just a year ago, it’s easy to get the impression that this is all rather common and not that complicated. But these two sites breathe some very, very rarefied air as there are just a handful of sites at the very top.

Pingdom, using Google’s top 1,000 websites data, has put together some pretty interesting, and rather good looking, charts showing just how few sites make it all the way up. Just to enter the top 1,000 you need 4.1 million monthly unique visitors. That’s not exactly a small number and it’s all uphill from here.

To get in the top 100 you need five times as many 22 million visitors, and for the top 50 you need to double that and reach 41 million. If you’re really aiming high, you need to be pulling in a lot of people, at least 230 million to be in the top 10. Finally, if you want to be the biggest site in the world, and top Facebook, you’ll need about 540 million.

There are a few caveats with the numbers, which are more obvious at the very top, Google’s data doesn’t include most of its own properties. Google Search, likely the world’s most popular website, is not in there and neither is YouTube and so on.

Looking at the graphs, especially the one with all the top 1,000 websites, the long tail of the web becomes pretty obvious. These are, after all, some of the world’s most popular websites yet the effect is fully noticeable.

The first 10 websites add up to 42 percent of the total visitor numbers for the top 100 and 21 percent of the entire top 1,000. The first 100 attract 50 percent of the visitors. Of course, people visit more than one website and the larger the audiences the more likely they are to overlap.