Download relaxation dynamics on the WWW following newspaper publication of URL

TL;DR

This study investigates the relaxation dynamics of the WWW's popularity following newspaper publication of a URL, revealing a power-law decay indicative of long-term memory effects in web traffic response.

Contribution

It provides the first quantification of the WWW's dynamical response to a newspaper notice, demonstrating a power-law relaxation in web popularity.

Findings

Web site downloads follow a 1/t^b power law with b≈0.58

Long-term memory effects are observed in web traffic dynamics

The relaxation behavior can be explained by persistence in the system

Abstract

A few key properties of the World-Wide-Web (WWW) has been established indicating the lack of any characteristic scales for the WWW, both in its topology and in its dynamics. Here, we report an experiment which quantifies another power law describing the dynamical response of the WWW to a Dirac-like perturbation, specifically how the popularity of a web site evolves and relaxes as a function of time, in response to the publication of a notice/advertisement in a newspaper. Following the publication of an interview of the authors by a journalist which contained our URL, we monitored the rate of downloads of our papers and found it to obey a $1/t^b$ power law with exponent $b=0.58\pm 0.03$. This small exponent implies long-term memory and can be rationalized using the concept of persistence, which specifies how long a relaxing dynamical system remains in a neighborhood of its initial configuration.