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Is the Web "contracting"? | page 1, 2
But let's put aside lingering questions about Media Metrix's approach, which tends to downplay Internet use at work. Assume, for the sake of argument, that these numbers are good. What do they tell us? The Times focused on that jump from 27 to 35 percent -- a significant number, to be sure. The statistic probably reflects a couple of trends. First, there's the continued consolidation among the big Web companies: When Yahoo acquires Geocities and Broadcast.com, or America Online buys Netscape, their slices of the "top sites' traffic" pie inevitably expand. Second, there's the strong incentive commercial Web sites have to maximize time spent on their pages and clicks per visit: These companies are devoting all of their considerable ingenuity and resources to push this number higher. To me, though, the message these numbers shout is that despite everything -- despite the vast sums being spent to advertise Internet companies offline ($1 billion projected for this year's fourth quarter, according to the Wall Street Journal), despite the enormous stock market attention focused on the big portals, despite the vast energy being devoted to making commercial sites "sticky" for users -- two-thirds of Web use is still eluding the "50 most popular sites"! My headline, in other words, wouldn't be "Web Travelers Follow Beaten Paths"; it would be "Web Travelers Continue to Go Their Own Way." The L.A. Times is not alone in its vision of a "contracting" Web. Piller's article echoes a June story in the New York Times, based on a study from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center: That report found that "the most popular Web sites command by far the biggest share of Internet traffic," with the "top 119 sites" receiving 32.36 percent of all visits. It painted the Web as a medium in which popular sites can parlay their existing traffic into more traffic -- or, as the Times' John Markoff put it, a place where "the rich are getting richer." Scott Rosenberg's column appears once a week in Technology Yet none of this should be shocking news: These are examples of "network effects." Once you have a lot of traffic, it's much easier to funnel that traffic to new offerings and services. In other words, if you're Yahoo, and you've got millions of people coming to your existing sites already, you can start up a new auction site and rest confident that you can point tons of people its way. Still, the site that got Yahoo, Amazon and every other big Web company to start thinking about auctions was a start-up company called eBay that essentially, in true Web fashion, came out of nowhere. Genuinely new ideas, services and business models still tend to bubble up from below on the Net. Before they become standard features on every portal, these innovations help launch major new sites and companies and change the makeup of that charmed inner circle of "top 50 sites." Though I may see a half-full glass where they highlight the emptiness, I wouldn't dismiss the kind of research reflected in the L.A. Times and New York Times stories -- there's value in tracking these usage trends. I just wouldn't rush to the conclusion that the Web's fundamental nature is changing, that "diversity and choice" are on the wane, simply because the big sites are increasing their chunk of the overall traffic. Let's assume the worst: Say that the commercial Web does indeed "contract" as a smaller and smaller group of portals and mega-sites continue to grow their share of total Web usage. Say that share even tops 50 percent. Even under this scenario, we're still left with a medium in which a huge percentage of what's being expressed on the Web has eluded the control of big companies and remains in the hands of individuals and smaller outfits. That remains a historically unprecedented level of "diversity and choice" compared to every preceding mass medium. As long as putting up a basic Web site remains simple and cheap -- and it seems to be getting simpler and cheaper by the day -- the Web's ability to serve as a petri dish for new ideas and a vast commons for human interaction will remain unimpaired. What the "contracting Web" alarmists seem to be forgetting is that not everyone who puts up a Web site is hoping to strike it rich, build a massive corporation or aggregate billions of "eyeballs." E-commerce is fine and dandy, but there are millions of people who simply want to use the Web as a medium for interpersonal communications. They don't expect their family photo page or fan site or special-interest bulletin board to make a mint. They don't care that their Media Metrix "reach" rating is infinitesimal, as long as the 10 or 100 or 1,000 people they'd like to reach have found their URL. The good news is that, though individually such small site traffic doesn't amount to much, collectively it still accounts for a huge slice of the Web-use pie. The TV analogy, imperfect but telling, would be a universe in which two-thirds of viewership went to public-access programming. Far from a depressing indication of a Web sliding fast toward mass-market conventionality, these numbers define a Web that remains historically unique in its openness to the offbeat start-up, the eccentric enthusiast and the passionate individualist. As long as that individualist doesn't develop delusions of Disney-scale empire that will inevitably disappoint, the little guys and the big sites should continue to coexist just fine.
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