On the surface, it seems obvious -- it's well known that web traffic fluctuates in correspondence with time of day. People browse the web more frequently during certain hours of the day. In a general sense, this is easy to understand. For example, people are sleeping at night, so they tend not to browse the web at night.

But for content creators, understanding the intricacies of these fluctuations is essential. Recent BuzzFeed data reveals a highly predictable daily pattern of web traffic where internet users reach their peak at in the early evening. (Note: My analysis looked at hourly web traffic to posts on BuzzFeed and across our partner network, a total of over 300 million monthly visitors. The data goes back to April 2011. To account for time zones, I looked at U.S. traffic only and to account for seasonal or daily fluctuations, I cross-validated my observations over various date ranges.)

What follows is an explanation of this pattern and information on what publishers and marketers should be doing to account for it.