This proves something that I have been thinking about lately. Just the act of writing down the problem helps to solve it, or at least helps to make it clearer.

I find this when I have a programming problem. It has happened a few times that I have started to pose my question in some online forum, and in the process of expressing the problem clearly, it has helped me to see the solution.

I attended a talk once that was on “Problem posing in mathematics”. The teacher got the students to pose their own problems (not answer the teacher’s problems). The act of thinking through and posing an intelligent problem that “worked” was a valuable learning experience in itself.

I believe that they mean 280k/million but not 280k that don’t visit another site. Thus, it could be the same 280k.

That said, and revisiting your log/semi-log curves. The distribution of market share [various measures would work] of various segments looks like your semi-log or log-log [depends] examples.

As for the geometric mean, I think they really are talking about the time series of values, not the product of the number of visitors times the number of pages, as you have put.

According to Buzzards Bay:

A geometric mean, unlike an arithmetic mean, tends to dampen the effect of very high or low values, which might bias the mean if a straight average (arithmetic mean) were calculated.

So it sounds like Alexa is finding the geometric mean of several days’ worth of stats, which can vary wildly.

I agree with you that there are some confusing definitions in there.