I hunted for Slate's Long Tail using a site traffic report for Tuesday, July 18. My wimpy computer thwarted my efforts to work with a longer time frame; the day's worth of data I've assessed here offers a sketchy representation of the site's traffic, but it's not a comprehensive portrait.

Slate got about 1.9 million hits that day, but a lot of those were hits on our home page, the Fray, and other areas of the site that don't work quite like regular Slate article pages. In the interest of performing an apples-to-apples comparison, I decided to focus exclusively on article pages and stripped out visits to the home page, the Fray, Doonesbury, Today's Cartoons, Today's Pictures, and our search page—that removed nearly 1.3 million hits.

I was left with a traffic report that accounted for 659,378 page views, and I used that data for the analysis in this piece.