Nick Carr's Wishful Thinking: Internet Consolidating Just Like Old Media
from the the-big-three dept
Although the internet has had a democratizing effect on media, few people are romantic (or naive) enough to think this means that everyone can now be heard equally. And, as people are realizing, the traffic share of the internet's top few destinations has been expanding. In 2001, the top 10 internet destinations commanded 31% of all traffic, a number which has risen to 40%. The conclusion that Nick Carr makes is that the internet has failed to live up to its promise as an "open, democratic medium" as the top sites come to resemble the major media networks of the past. But even if you accept the data at face value (and there may be some reason to doubt this due to things like RSS feeds) Carr's conclusion doesn't necessarily follow. For one thing, the internet's top 10 destinations today aren't the same ones as they were in 2001. So not only is the top of the heap much more fluid than in broadcast media, but it's a mistake to even talk about the "top 10" as an entity that ebbs and flows. Imagine if he'd written this article in 2001; he'd be talking about the unassailable dominance of Yahoo, while sites like MySpace and Facebook (who he now complains are dominating) were still years away from existing. As a corollary to this, the underlying reason for the consolidation of internet traffic is totally different than the reason there were only 3 major TV networks for so long. While internet users may swarm around certain hot sites, it's still due to their choice, not due to constraints. Finally, even within the popular sites, content is delivered from a wide variety of sources. Google dominates the search space, but users don't go there to get information that Google creates. When people go to MySpace, they're not there to be fed content from MySpace, but to communicate with their friends. So while the underlying traffic analysis is interesting -- and it will be worth following this trend to see whether it continues or not -- it doesn't follow that the internet now simply resembles other media forms.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
New users to the internet don’t flock to Techdirt or very many smaller sites out there. They jump on the ones that they’ve heard about on the news, are linked to by places like their local news station who blasts their own site at you every 5 minutes during their nightly broadcast, or they follow their equally newbie friends. The point being that the balance of power hasn’t shifted so much as that new users are congregating on new user attention traps.
It suits me just fine. While those users may be a good source of fresh new clicks for their banner ads, their overall contribution to the internet is quite low on average. Let Fox and Google deal with them.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]