Content delivery networks (CDNs ) company Akami counts 7 of the top 10 social networking sites as customers and claims that 92% of traffic to such destinations was carried across their network in December. Overall, traffic to these sites increased more than 5x over the past year, with Akamai delivering more than one million requests per second (!). Given the growth rates in unique visitors we’ve seen from the reporting companies like comScore, which are healthy but not quite in the 5x magnitude, it can be surmised that a lot of the traffic growth is coming in the form of people spending more time on these sites, while also adding widgets and apps which increases the bandwidth being consumed on Akamai’s network.
What exactly is a “Content Delivery Network” you might ask?
Essentially, sites with tons of traffic turn to services like Akamai and Limelight to optimize load times. They provide Google-like infrastructure to companies that don’t want to invest tens of millions to build their own data centers.
http://mashable.com/2008/01/23/social-media-traffic/
http://www.akamai.com/
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