Economics Bloggers have a long tail

Economics Bloggers have a long tail. It’s a classic Pareto analysis. 20% of the sites attract 80% of the visitors. Using information from  Gongol.com and the analysis of the traffic for business and economics web sites we find that Pareto rules yet again.

In 1897 an Italian mathematician Pareto had undertaken a study of income distribution in England in which 20% of the population accounted for 80% of the wealth. When this data was compared to many other countries in Europe, the ratio remained the same. Pareto had discovered not just a law of distribution as applied to income flows but a law of distribution that existed in any sizeable dataset.

Based on an analysis of the top 100 business and economics sites the distribution is as follows:
Blogs%         Traffic %
10                    72
20                    82
30                    89
40                    92
50                    95
60                    97
70                    98
80                    99
90                    99

Twenty per cent of the sites attract eighty two per cent of the traffic. Half the sites account for over 90% of the traffic. That’s about as good a Pareto fit as can be expected. Economic bloggers have a long tail but to be successful it has to be a fat one. Check out Chris Anderson but also check out the sting in the tale.

Chris Anderson : The Long Tail : Amazon

Download : What's wrong with Chris Anderson - the sting in the tale

Comments

[Richard H. Serlin]

You limited your sample to the top 100, due to a big lack of data. If you could look at all economics blogs, thousands or more, I don't think it would fit Pareto's 20/80 very well. It would probably be something like 2/80, or even more extreme. Plus, your data didn't include some of the huge ones like Krugman's.

[Mark Wadsworth]

Ah, the 80/20 rule, one of my favourite rules of thumb. It pops up everywhere.

[JKA]

Hi Richard,
Thanks for the visit and for the post.
Good spot. Gongol lists 150 sites with visitor scores.
Had the analysis included all, the ratio would have been 88:20 rather than 82: 20
And the 50 marker would have been 98:50 versus 95:50
That's still a good Pareto fit.
The post is a slight rail against the Chris Anderson Long Tail.
Hence the PDF
JKA

[Bubble Meter]

Gongol leaves out quite a few econ blogs. Where's Paul Krugman's blog? Where's News N Economics? Where's Bubble Meter?