From a technical standpoint, the most interesting thing in the story is that the Al-Jazeera sites typically receive traffic “in the range of 50 or 60 Mbps.” If you skimmed over those numbers, you shouldn’t. Ladies and gentleman, that is some serious traffic, and I say that having watched the MRTG graphs at some pretty big media web sites. If you ever wondered if Al-Jazeera was for real or not, there’s your answer.
Having looked at the same MRTG graphs (I would love to have seen them at the start of the current war), I wonder if this isn’t a way of advertising a web site’s popularity. Everyone likes to think web access logs are the only measurement, but looking at a set of graphs that measure traffic flow in close to real time gives a sense of scale and capacity that page view counts don’t do very well.
A formula could be expressed as volume of traffic in bits divided by average page size (images and other stuff will pollute the data somewhat). Also factoring in what fraction of capacity is utilized at a given flow of bits might give an ad buyer a sense of how likely their ad will be seen when the flash crowd shows up.
Here’s mine: not in Al-Jazeera territory . . . .
The bottom line: I’d like to see more sites make a sample of their bandwidth numbers public.