(Note: This is a part of a series of articles on the Techmeme leaderboard. Stay tuned for more)
The Techmeme Leaderboard, though less than a year old, is already THE authority on, well, authority on the blogosphere (Technorati Top 100 is THE authority on popularity). Analysis of authority is always interesting, so I headed over to the Techmeme Leadeboard, and conjured this analysis out of thin air 
Long Tail Playground? Or A-List party place?
(This graph would have looked like a flag if not for the pseudo-3D look, no?)
As you can see, the top 10 sites contribute about ~29% of the headline content, and the Top 25 contribute about 45%. More importantly, the sites that have never set foot on the Top 100 contribute 33%, or about one third of the headlines. Here’s a perhaps-easier-to-grok pie chart of the same data:
This pie chart represents the state of the Techmeme Leaderboard at this instant. 28% of all stories come from the Top 10 sites. However, 32% come from sites which are not in the Top 100.
So, a large number of small blogs contribute about one third of Techmeme’s headlines. Long tail playground.
This is the first in a series of posts dissecting the Techmeme Leaderboard. If you have any specific things you need to know, post ‘em over in the comments (Louis Gray already sent me his list ;))
10 responses so far ↓
1 Techmeme: Where the A-Listers Party With the Long Tail. // May 5, 2008 at 12:49 pm
[...] carted out as Exhibit A in this argument, which is why I was glad to see the chart above from the StatBot. It shows the distribution of headlines on Techmeme by rank on the Techmeme [...]
2 ana // May 5, 2008 at 1:47 pm
The assumption that blogs that rank lower than the Top 100 are already part of the long tail is just silly. Show us a graph of the traffic distribution per blog, and then we can see what is the long tail and what is the short head. The Top 100 is just a small portion of the short head.
3 olie // May 5, 2008 at 2:49 pm
If I read this correctly, it looks like you have your 28 & 32% swapped around. That is, 32% come from the top 10, and 28% come from “everyone else.”
It’s still a lot — in fact, it’s still well within the “about 1/3″ range — I’m just pointing out the color-coding of the data.
4 Techmeme and the “A-list” canard » mathewingram.com/work | // May 5, 2008 at 3:17 pm
[...] or how it’s dominated by the “A-listers” — so it’s nice to see a little empirical data from Yuvi, the 17-year-old data guru behind Statbot. Yuvi and his statistical abilities were [...]
5 TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Techmeme：大物とロングテールが共存するところ // May 5, 2008 at 6:24 pm
[...] 今ウェブでいちばん話題になっているテク系ニュースを扱う人気ブログ＆ニュースサイトTechmeme、に対するbitchmeme（Techmemeへのグチ）の中でも気に入っているのが、Techmemeは大物ブログやニュースサイトなどの専任ライターを置いているサイトに席巻されている、という話題だ。ブロゴスフィアがプロ化してしまったために、独立系ブロガーが話題から取り残されてしまっているのではないかというのだ。TechCrunchはこの議論の中で実例として出されることがあるのだが、それだけにStatBotに出ていた上のグラフは嬉しい。これは、Techmemeランキングでの記事の分布をサイト順位別に表したものだ。 [...]
6 links for 2008-05-06 « David Black // May 5, 2008 at 8:36 pm
[...] One third of Techmeme’s headlines come from the Long Tail: The Statbot - The StatBot “As you can see, the top 10 sites contribute about ~29% of the headline content, and the Top 25 contribute about 45%. More importantly, the sites that have never set foot on the Top 100 contribute 33%, or about one third of the headlines” (tags: internet socialmedia blogging news aggregators longtail stats visualisation techmeme) [...]
7 Alex Hammer // May 6, 2008 at 10:29 am
Impressive.
8 notes, thoughts, ideas and responses » The Techmeme Leaderboard Shows A Power Law Relationship // May 19, 2008 at 6:29 am
[...] One third of Techmeme’s headlines come from the Long Tail [...]
9 www.ubraniaroxy.pl » Blog Archive » Techmeme: Where the A-Listers Party With the Long Tail. // May 19, 2008 at 5:29 pm
[...] carted out as Exhibit A in this argument, which is why I was glad to see the chart above from the StatBot. It shows the distribution of headlines on Techmeme by rank on the Techmeme [...]
10 Ian Lamont // Jul 22, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Just wanted to say that my analysis of Techmeme’s leaderboard, made just a few months after yours (http://tinyurl.com/6syp3b), found slightly different results. The sites that are outside of the top 100 recently accounted for just 28% of the indexed headlines, down five percentage points from what you observed. I have a bunch of other observations and hypotheses relating to these findings, and I’d be interested in hearing your reaction.
Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard
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