Ink is making interesting claims for traffic

7 billion hits per day

[Billythekid]

I don't buy it. Any comments?

"Inktomis numbers:7 billion hits per day in AOL's Traffic Server"
[inktomi.com...]

[littleman]

I believe that must be total traffic that there proxy servers handle, not search engine traffic. If you consider all the page, image, and mp3 traffic it is possible.

[Brett_Tabke]

What is AOL claiming for membership now? 25 million? If it were just pages, that would take each AOL user viewing 280 pages. I wonder what the average page size is in total number of requests (true object hits) per page? Any data like that lurking around the net?

[Laisha]

>What is AOL claiming for membership now? 25 million?

Actually, they are claiming approximately 25 million paid accounts.

Remember, though, that each of those has the capacity to have 7 total. Thus, a woman might have the "master screen name," while her husband has another and each of their 5 kids may have their own. So, each account has the potential for having 7 sets of eyeballs attached to it.

The last I heard, the average was 3.5 -=different=- people using different screen names per account. That would work out to 87,500,000 sets of eyeballs.

I'm very bad at visualizing numbers, amounts, etc., but that may or may not be relevant here.