  We analyze access statistics of several popular webpages for a period of
several years. The graphs of daily downloads are highly non-homogeneous with
long periods of low activity interrupted by bursts of heavy traffic. These
bursts are due to avalanches of blog entries, referring to the page. We
quantitatively explain this behavior using the theory of branching processes.
We extrapolate these findings to construct a model of the entire web. According
to the model, the competition between webpages for viewers pushes the web into
a self-organized critical state. In this regime, the most interesting webpages
are in a near-critical state, with a power law distribution of traffic
intensity.
