Eur. Phys. J. B (2013) 86: 266 (2013)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2013-40132-2

Regular Article

The decentralized flow structure of clickstreams on the web^*

¹ Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, P.R. China
² School of Management, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, P.R. China

^a e-mail: zhangjiang@bnu.edu.cn

Received: 17 February 2013
Received in final form: 19 April 2013
Published online: 12 June 2013

Abstract

The browsing behavior of massive web users forms a flow network transporting user’ collective attention between websites. By analyzing the circulation of the collective attention we discover the scaling relationship between the impact of sites and their traffic. We construct three clickstreams networks, whose nodes were websites and edges were formed by the users’ switching between sites. The impact of site i, C_i, is measured by the clickstreams controlled by this site in the circulation of clickstreams. We find that C_i scales sublinearly with A_i, the traffic of site i. Specifically, there existed a relationship C_i ~ A_i^γ(γ < 1), which implies the decentralized structure of the clickstream circulation.