Inconsistent Color Palettes

I recently needed to get a color palette for a site, so I wrote a simple ruby script that traverses a site's stylesheets to build their color palette.

Before seeing these generated palettes, I assumed I would see a around 20 colors. But to my surprise, the number of different colors for a site's palette ranged from 5 to 331. wow!

Here are a few sites and their colors/frequencies:

Hacker News

Palette for http://news.ycombinator.com
number of unique colors: 5
--------|-----------
Color   |Frequency
--------|-----------
#828282 |12
#000000 |6
#dddddd |2
#222222 |1
#ffffff |1

NY Times

Palette for http://nytimes.com
number of unique colors: 22
--------|-----------
Color   |Frequency
--------|-----------
#000000 |25    
#333333 |18
#ffffff |13
#808080 |13
#004276 |12
#999999 |12
#666666 |10
#f0f4f5 |7
#efefef |3
#a81817 |2
#909090 |2
#f8f8d4 |1
#808285 |1
#bababa |1
#cccccc |1
#c33338 |1
#eeeeee |1
#666699 |1
#3c8a37 |1
#aaaaaa |1
#939393 |1
#f2f2f2 |1

Coderwall

Palette for http://coderwall.com
number of unique colors: 44
--------|-----------
Color   |Frequency
--------|-----------
#000000 |102
#ffffff |83
#3e8dcc |53
#343131 |38
#48494e |12
#a1a1a1 |11
#191919 |10
#393939 |7
#69879c |6
#d75959 |4
#667d8d |4
#555555 |4
#cfcdb8 |3
#6d7174 |3
#008000 |2
#2d2d2d |2
#a3a4a6 |2
#52b327 |2
#205a87 |2
#c4c4c4 |2
#bfceda |2
#c7ced1 |1
#0000ff |1
#8c8c8c |1
#b3b29f |1
#efefef |1
#115f8b |1
#c8d4d8 |1
#4e4f53 |1
#687275 |1
#8ea4af |1
#9da4a8 |1
#a5a5a5 |1
#94d9ff |1
#fc7365 |1
#e1e1e1 |1
#8bcced |1
#8bc682 |1
#141414 |1
#a0a4a5 |1
#61a1aa |1
#6eaac9 |1
#ffff00 |1
#616161 |1

Amazon

Palette for http://amazon.com
number of unique colors: 75
--------|-----------
Color   |Frequency
--------|-----------
#e47911 |30
#ffffff |19
#000000 |14
#666666 |12
#004b91 |10
#333333 |8
#3c7736 |7
#999999 |7
#990000 |5
#4296b8 |4
#b51a1a |4
#106eb8 |3
#f87500 |2
#111111 |2
#efefef |2
#cf210f |2
#5f5461 |2
#f15a29 |2
#faad31 |2
#af72ac |1
#a5c132 |1
#3d8dd6 |1
#62c8c9 |1
#c30909 |1
#681c0a |1
#eaf3fe |1
#3f4c58 |1
#fdce1c |1
#e3300f |1
#f47629 |1
#009e29 |1
#efedd4 |1
#d62628 |1
#86875d |1
#502f54 |1
#faa61a |1
#777777 |1
#f3e021 |1
#5c5c5c |1
#f58540 |1
#0057b2 |1
#2e314c |1
#661d1d |1
#7d7d7d |1
#799824 |1
#2468c1 |1
#f8981d |1
#922a8b |1
#e3549e |1
#a9cb57 |1
#8e7768 |1
#a89f9b |1
#6c9c31 |1
#a7c742 |1
#ffd000 |1
#e5add1 |1
#0bafbc |1
#b6edff |1
#599041 |1
#276823 |1
#4aa3c6 |1
#991b37 |1
#f4a9b7 |1
#ed1b69 |1
#2e3741 |1
#ededed |1
#101419 |1
#009900 |1
#930015 |1
#996633 |1
#1c673c |1
#ab8e53 |1
#eeeeee |1
#146eb4 |1
#888888 |1

I think you get the idea now. Saving you from reading through hundreds of more hex colors, I'll just list the sites and the number of different colors they use (you can regenerate these tables using the script linked at bottom).

techcrunch.com: 33
heroku.com: 44
twitter.com: 112
codeacademy.com: 176
github.com: 331

Let's briefly look at Amazon, who has a pretty solid 5-color palette (orange, white, black, blue and gray), to try to get an idea of why they have 75 colors. For simplicity, let's just look at their most used color: orange.

Amazon's Orange Variations:
e47911, used 30 times
f87500, used twice
f47629, used once
f58540, used once
f8981d, used once

It seems as if a lot of sites generally use about 10-20 colors (ballpark estimate) but heavily vary them (i.e. hand pick a color that looks "close enough"). Because of this, instead of having a solid 20-color palette, they have an overlapping, if you will, 100-something color palette.

After looking at all these different palettes, I started wondering how many different colors a site should limit their color palette to. Is 100 obnoxious and due to choosing colors in a lazy manner ("oh, that looks like the orange we use on our homepage. let's use that.")? Is 5 too simple? Just something I've been pondering.

=============================================

you can download and run the script from here: https://github.com/alyssa/color-palette

If you want to see hex colors, i found this site useful: http://www.colorhexa.com