Dynamic model for the popularity of websites.

In this paper, we have studied a dynamic model to explain the observed characteristics of websites in the World Wide Web. The dynamic model consists of the self-growth term for each website and the external force term acting on the website. With simulations of the model, we can explain most of the important characteristics of websites. These characteristics include a power-law distribution of the number of visitors to websites, fluctuation in the fractional growth of individual websites, and the relationship between the age and the popularity of the websites. We also investigated a few variants of the model and showed that the ingredients included in the model adequately explain the behavior of the websites.