Network Explanations to the Web Economy’s Patterns of Growth

From its early days, the World Wide Web space has demonstrated strong agglomeration trends with a very small number of web sites capturing the larger part of the Internet population. The large majority of Internet users uses only a small number of sites (for searching for information and products, interacting with others and socializing), thus producing dense concentrations and locational patterns similar to those observed in the physical space, where few cities and industrial clusters host the huge majority of population as well as the entire industrial activity. Does this phenomenon depend on the attractiveness of the popular web sites or are there positive feedback mechanisms providing incentives to users to be in a location which have been visited by other users or pointed-in by other sites? This paper provides a sound basis for the dynamics of population concentration in the Web and puts forward an explanation to web sites’ growth by developing an agent-based computational model, with behavioural and economic variables. The model reproduces the empirically observed power law distribution of Internet users across web sites and demonstrates that a plausible explanation of web agglomeration phenomena lie on the existence cumulative processes, involving some form of increasing returns and the percolation-like diffusion of the information over the Web.