The Bigger Internet & Converging Traffic

Nicholas Carr points to interesting statistics : between the end of 2001 and the end of last year, the number of Internet domains expanded by more than 75%, from 2.9m to 5.1m. At the same time, however, the dominance of the most popular domains grew substantially. At the end of 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31% of all the pages viewed on the net. By the end of last year, the top 10 accounted for fully 40% of page views. Google now handles 65% of all web searches, up from 58% just a year ago. Despite aggressive attempts by Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask to boost their own shares of the search market, Google continues to widen its lead. There are more destinations online, but we seem to be visiting fewer of them.

He therefore concludes 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.

While data points look interesting, in reality the internet has really liberated the users minds in exerting choices. Fact remains that the composition of the top ten sites was different as recent as three years back and one does not know, in the collaboration hungry world, what would be the dominant platform(s). Due to considered choice, there may be more convergence towards preferred sites – but traffic in internet appears more promiscuous and fact remains that the possibilities around the internet remains endless – which means a lot more is yet to come out. Even assuming that the net grows at the current rates in a predetermined trajectory, newer business model centric players would begin to become very important – for example players like techmeme, twitter all show signs of providing more and more choices to users. What can explain the phenomenal growth of the blogosphere. More growth, newer business models and newer players would offer better and varying choices to users.

Labels: Emerging Trends