Long Tail Traffic Statistics & Impact on Caching Strategy

Simple Thoughts Traffic

I am sure you have heard about long tail theory on web traffic. Just how important is it?

The pie-chart on your left shows the long tail traffic on Simple Thoughts blog. The colored segment represents the top 10 most popular articles on this blog and accounts for approximately 12% of traffic. The remaining 88% is contributed by the long tail.

What does it mean to you in terms of content?

I think the simplest conclusion we can draw from this is that to make any site popular there should be lot of quality content. The only other factor that seems to matter, at least on my site, is catchy titles which tend to move itself towards the top of the list.

How does it impact your web site caching strategy?

I think a simple MRU caching strategy will work best for caching the top 10-20 URL content in memory. The remaining content may then be cached using a file based cache.