Successful Websites
How much traffic do "successful" websites get?
The answer depends on the definition of success. Different websites will obviously have different goals; for example, a small business site would not measure itself against the traffic of amazon.com — it would aim for the maximum realistic traffic that a small business site can hope for. In addition, a website with low traffic can make more money than a "large" website if its visitors are leveraged well.
I like to think of website success being divided into tiers, in which we start with a single visitor per day and work upwards in multiples of ten. The chart below shows what I mean. Note that I am referring to unique visitors, i.e. the estimated number of actual people that visited the site. This is different to hits, which mean nothing useful.
| Unique visits per day | Type of website |
| 1 | Any site can get one visitor per day, even your terminally boring family home page. All it needs is a reasonable amount of content and a few links from other websites. |
| 10 | Ten visits is quite achievable for any site, but it will require a little work. Not much, just a little. |
| 100 | A small to moderate sized business can get 100 visits if the site is well promoted. |
| 1,000 | Large businesses can get a thousand daily visits just through their branding, but other sites would need something out of the ordinary to attract this many people. This would be a good target for a niche site or a local community site. |
| 10,000 | Most webmasters would consider ten thousand visits to be a big success. Niche topic sites usually struggle to get this much traffic, although it is achievable. Sites in this range include popular resource sites, government departments, etc. |
| 100,000 | Not many sites can average one hundred thousand visitors per day. To do this a site must target a very large audience (usually international) and be very popular, e.g. large social network sites. In webmaster circles this would be considered a spectacular success, second only to the revered top-tier sites... |
| 1,000,000 | This level of traffic is only achieved by the likes of Google, Yahoo, Youtube, Wikipedia, etc. |