Slashdot Mirror
Four Companies Get Half Your Clicks
AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Napster. These four "web properties"
account for
50 percent of the time people spend online.
Check out the trend: at the 60-percent level, the number of companies shrank from 110, two years ago, to fourteen today. Hello, I'm with Mergers & Acquisitions, can I borrow your mouse please?
Thats funny... I don't visit any of those four.... whats wrong with all the rest of you people?
It is fairly easy to lie with statistics. Meaning that the results depend heavily on the research methods used, from whom (what people groups, demographics, etc) and how the data was actually acquired and so on. A lot of people won't show on almost any on the statistics, there are huge user groups who couldn't care less about those web pages,.. If they have got their people in a way that doesn't produce a describing sample, for instance asking from Microsoft magazine subscribers (lol), you can scrap the whole thing. There are hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of pitfalls that can compromise the study integrity and most likely this study can be classified as pure trash in case someone really bothers to check all the things out.
The amount of clicks doesn't also equal the time spent on the pages. If I open www.microsoft.com and go have a cup of coffee and then click something, I have "been" on the page for an hour? Besides, doesn't it just tell that the pages are very BAD if I can't find anything from the labyrinth of www.microsoft.com and I just have to spend 3 hours and 700 clicks to find one single file?
The claim that those couple companies would get "that many surfers" is simply not true. I haven't seen anyone actually ever visit any of the company pages/services listed on the research. They have obviosly not reached all possible surfer groups, causing a severe disorientation in the survey data.
Sorry guys.. But forget the whole thing as fud/crap/whatever. Never mind. And the M$ (/Yahoo etc) pros stop cheering.
Dear God,
When I die and go to heaven or hell the only thing I ask of you is you send the two previous posters to the other place.
Thank you.
> I'm suprised Yahoo! is so popular.
Well, one thing that both MS and Yahoo! have in common is free email. Yahoo! (unlike google) also mirrors lots of content (news articles, weather, TV listings, maps, yellow pages, etc), so you can spend a good amount of time searching Yahoo! and never have to leave. With google, you type your search and off you go...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I was also about to post a link to the report from Jupiter Media Metrix, but I am glad to see that someone else has done the same research. After a bit of URL-wrestling (removing some junk and user-tracking stuff), the direct link to the report is:r 010604.
http://www.jup.com/company/pressrelease.jsp?doc=p
Indeed, the most interesting part of this report (not mentioned in the article) is that AOL Time Warner gets almost one third of the total time spent online, mostly through e-mail and instant messaging. All other companies get less than 8% each. Outside the top 10, they get less than 0.5%.
This report measures the time spent looking at or using the web sites or applications (e-mail, messaging, ...) but does not say anything about the number of "clicks", number of advertisements seen, or total traffic. The time spent reading or composing e-mail messages should not be counted in the same way as the time spent looking at some web sites, because the user is focused on different things. Also, if two thirds of the time spent on AOL Time Warner comes from communication services, I expect that Microsoft gets a fair share of time from its MSN Hotmail service, but the report does not provide any details about this.
-Raphaël
Now, here's a thought.
Say you owned a diner or pinball alley or something like that. Say a bunch of well known thugs frequented your establishment. Even say that while they are there, they are well mannered and even pay for drinks. However, they sit in the back corner, planning their next hits, and other illegal deeds. Do you, as the establishment owner, have any moral obligation to turn them in? Or do you, as the establishment owner, have any moral obligation to ban them from said establishment?
If Napster wants to pretend that its users aren't trading illegal MP3's (indeed, wasn't that one of it's early "advertising" pushes? "You'll find everything you ever wanted on Napster" kinda attitude?), the fact is, people are. Millions of them, although the number has gone down due to the filtering and such. Honestly, I like it this way. I don't listen to "mainstream" music, anyway, and the stuff I listen to is usually rather obscure and I pretty much own the physical materials as well. For example, I have the It's A Small World punk compilation with a great Jawbreaker song on it, but having no working LP player, I can't rip it to MP3. However, I did find it on Napster, saving me the trouble. I personally don't know where Blake of Jawbreaker stands on trading his bands' MP3's around, but I hope that this falls under "fair use".
Basically, if Napster can't survive with the filters in place, with only independent and pro-napster music being traded over it's network, then it deserves to die. Period. If it requires pirating to justify itself and make the numbers it needs to keep investors happy, then it deserves to die. Period. I'm hoping that's there's enough interest in 'non-mainstream' music to support it, though.
Napster needs to forget about "swooning" Sony, BMI, etc. They won't be happy until they either a) shut Napster down or b) buy Napster outright (ala MP3.com). Napster needs to get back to the grassroots, where it began, and start talking with Merge, Touch and Go, SubPop, Fat Wreck Chords, Dischord and a myriad of other small, independent labels and get their support. When the artists that come from these smaller labels to majors are used to the idea of swapping songs on Napster, they will demand it when they "make it big." Think of it like getting used to an OS. UNIX made it big in the server room because the computer scientists used UNIX in college, it was what they knew. NT is making rather large inroads in middle-line corporations because it's what's on the desktop, it's what the support people know, and through generous college grants, more and more students are being exposed to it. So, we get the future music execs used to the idea of napster, we get the future "big name acts" used to napster, and hey, we might have a winner.
just a thought.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
If you consider that AOL, Hotmail (MS) and Yahoo all offer very popular web-mailers, it becomes obvious why Google isn't included in the list.
No, it doesn't mean www.microsoft.com, even though it's one of the most frequently visited sites on the net. It means MSN and all sites that belong to that "division" such as Hotmail, Expedia and possibly MSNBC too, though I'm not sure about that.
And let's not diss Microsoft about their site because quite frankly, MSDN is one of the best tech documentation sites on the net! The MS knowledge base is also very good..
Microsoft products have their place, but you are wrong in saying they dont hold a gun to our heads.
I am constantly getting word documents emailed to me that contain a few lines of text (some from Sun distrubuters!) I use Solaris, i dont want to receive text in doc format, i certainly dont want to receive it through email (look at the size difference between doc and ascii files).
I choose not to use Microsoft products, the trouble is I get forced into a situation where I HAVE to. (Word, IE (web sites being specifically written to chuck out browsers that are non-MS (there is no reason for this other than market dominance goals))).
As for MS products being better than the competition, personally I think not. BUT that is a personal opinion, based on my own preferences.
M.
Bitter and twisted, DON'T ever FORGET the TWISTED
Really, does it? The huge expansion in connectivity, while it has certainly benefited some geeks, has mostly been in hooking up joe blow and jane gno. These are people that were really ok with television, but now that the internet is trendy they have to get onboard. Naturally they gravitate to sites that mimic television, that make things simple, etc etc. And naturally, for that crowd, there can only be a few sites at a time that are popular.
This is nothing to be either surprised or alarmed at. As long as these people and the companies they support don't change the basic structure of the internet, we can coexist. Vigilance is called for, but no less so than yesterday. Watch ICANN, watch ".net" and "hailstorm" and raise the most unholy rucous ever seen when necessary to defend that structure, for certain. But don't panic on this "news." It is, sadly, a given.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
... the reason why people spend so much time there is that if you are really trying to find something usefull eg. downloads or some documentation, they are impossible to find because everything seems to be behind 100*n clicks..
--
yush
I'm 22. Getting a modem when I was 14 meant calling BBSes. That required that we knew to get a modem, and knew to find things. The people I meant online were similarly intelligent, because their was a learning curve.
When I was 17, the people coming onto my favorite multiline BBS were the more general public. Their parents had bought a new computer, and a modem happened to be in the machine. They got the number from a friend, and never ventured. At one point I called 10-15 boards, by the end I was down to 2 or 3. They never called more than 1.
Now, my girlfriend's kid sister (15) is online. Her family uses AOL because it's easy. She spends ALL her time in AOL things and Yahoo. She plays Yahoo games, hangs out in Yahoo chats, etc.
She isn't stupid, but Yahoo and AOL satisfy her needs. She doesn't feel the need to venture out. If she is interested in a piece of information (which the web is good for), she can search for it. But random cult sites aren't getting found anymore.
Hell, my personal viewing has dropped from HOURS surfing around following links 4 years ago to 6 or 7 news websites. I don't good off on the Net (outside of Slashdot).
Quite frankly, with the money that was in the Internet for a few years, people built up. Also, if you are an executive at Yahoo and saw something on a hobby site that you thought was cool, wouldn't you have your staff build it in a few weeks. If the page owner was a killer hacker and knocked it off in 2 days, wouldn't it be likely that Yahoo could reimplement it in 2 weeks or 2 months?
There is LESS compelling reasons to venture around on the Internet. You used to need to go to random places for things. Those of us that used Yahoo by '96 (when I did briefly) found a need to go elsewhere... The old-timers from earlier USED Yahoo to go elsewhere. Now, Yahoo provides lots of resources, instead of just information about what else is there.
I'm not convinced that younger people will change this. They may go out and explore, but there is less and less compelling outside the big boys. There used to be neat games that could only be found elsewhere, but they were all bought up by big sites.
For information, people will still do searches. However, the Web as a leisure activity will likely outnumber the web as a research tool for a LONG time.
Alex
The thing with google is that is so good at doing it's work so you are there a very short time. You look up something, get a good hit and you're gone. With yahoo (I do use it sometimes) you wade through page after page to get to what you are looking for. MSN and microsoft get a huge amount of traffic because of default page install and immense ammounts of redirects. Just look at you that status bar go!.. Not to speak of all the hotmail users who get to msn at loging off... .*shrc is
--
$HOME is where the
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Around 1995 is when I disovered the internet I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. A place where people could share ideas and information that was centered around the world, a place where anyone could be a publisher. Best of all, it wasn't tainted by big stupid money and advertisements. It was just like... a cerebral connection between people with similar interests or that just wanted to share information.
Then the web got all commercial. Nowadays it's a freaking ad-fest. Most major sites are whored out to major corporations at least to some extent. Which really depressed me for a long time. I watched the internet being ruined by commercialism.
The really sad part is that the average Joe on the street has already become dissillusioned about the internet. People are actually turning AWAY from the internet at this point. Do you know how many 30 and 40-somethings I know that have "tried" the Internet and found it stupid? To them, the internet is AOL or MSN. Just more chances to have their eyeballs spammed with ads and do a little shopping- in other words, just like the rest of our capitalist world except less convenient to use (compared with TV or opening up a magazine). In their eyes... the internet is absolutely nothing special... basically just TV, with hyperlinks, and added technical annoyances. Plus everyone's sick of hearing about the dot-com thing, which is a huge turn-off. They don't know or care about the rest of the internet, the real communities of people and the intellectual potential out there...
Which sucks, obviously. But then I realized... the cool part of the internet is still THERE! All that commerical bullshit floating on the surface doesn't prevent people from using the internet the way it was meant to be used... for sharing information and ideas and fun, not a fucking online version of tabloid magazines and shopping malls (not that buying things online isn't cool).
In fact... I realized it's all the money coming in from mass media that's actually helping the cool part of the net... paying for more bandwidth, driving the PC pricewars, etc.
So what I'm saying is, while it sucks that 50% of the clicks are concentrated on such a small number of huge-corporate-monolith sites... but you know what... fuck those people who are supplying those clicks. They're the stupid, mass-media brainwashed masses... not the type you really WANT contributing to Slashdot... or any other worthwhile online (or offline) endeavor. Let's just be glad their dollars are helping to fund things like broadband access and so on. We can still use the internet how it was meant to be used.
(Of course... we still need to be vigilant. The money pouring in from the corporate whores could have a polluting effect on the "cool" parts of the internet, too... witness things like the DCMA... etc..)
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Copying is not stealing. Copying something you don't own and don't have permission to copy is stealing.
The problem with theives like Napster is that they make it harder for the rest of us that want "fair use" to continue to exist in the digital age. By blatantly ignoring copyright they make it easier to justify "tightening up" the law.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
2. Because only REAL MEN type the URL...
3. They don't want to read the whole article either, like us slashdotters.
4. They're looking for the "BillG ate my balls" links.
5. They have to find out why their win 9x box just died.
6. No one else has that useless I-Greeting thing.
7. It's their cover page for surfing slashdot at work.
8. They want to know if that email about getting money for forwarding it is REALLY true.
9. They already sent the email, and are trying to find out where their checks are.
10. That's where the best Pr0n is, man!
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
Napster give away something you should be paying for. MS and AOL are both default homepages for installed browsers. Its hardly suprising they'd get a lot of users surfing time.
That said, I'm suprised Yahoo! is so popular. And that Google isn't.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Yahoo! uses Google for it's searches.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
v10137 r b1u3
4a1f my c11ck
r b310ng 2 u
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Awwwwwwwwwwww... Group hug, everyone!
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Hey, look--I found a better example, right here under my chair!
Let's say that Bob's Corner Grocery has one aisle of produce and ninteen aisles of kitchen knives. The vast majority of the kitchen knives are stolen property, though purchased by Bob from various distributors (Bob himself wouldn't even think of stealing somebody else's property.) "Heck, I'm no criminal," Bob is fond of saying, "I just sell groceries. It's not any of my business how my suppliers get their goods, now, is it?"
You're the dupe that looks straight into Bob's bewildered, childish eyes and says, "It's OK, Bob. You're not part of the problem. Don't you worry one bit, I still believe in you!" right as the police arrive to drag him downtown.
Napster does indeed give away something you should be paying for. Napster, before it started getting sued, was doing exactly jack and squat to curb the distribution of copyrighted material through it's service. The Napster client app is completely useless without the central server, and Napster is in charge of running that server. It's like saying that the bullet just happened to hit Mr. Doe, and all this poor guy here did was pull the trigger.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Things usually get wrong when a Slashdot article is written about an article that has been written about an article.
1. The slashdot header is about four companies getting "half the clicks" when the report measured "time spent online". Quite something different.
2. The article from the e-commerce times did not include a link to the original report and did not print the actual numbers from the Jupiter Media Metrix report. You can find the report from Jupiter here: http://www.jup.com/company/pressreleaselist.jsp
3. When you look at the numbers you see that AOL alone gets 32% of the minutes spent, Microsoft gets 7.5%, Yahoo 7.2% and Napster gets 3.6%.
And even the report from Jupiter says very little about the method: "Total Usage Minutes: The total number of usage minutes spent at the online property, Web site, category, channel or application during the course of the reporting period."
In my opinion this report only states what we already knew: many American households connect to the Internet via AOL.
Saying these 4 companies get half my clicks is like saying I live in a nicer house because my property taxes went up. Mergers and acquisitions have no effect on the friend sites, club sites, weird physics rant sites and so forth which I visit frequently. I don't care if ONE company owns all the sites I never look at, as long as the part of the Internet I actually USE is still available.
The report refers to "time spent online".
I can't help noticing that Napster and Microsoft both offer very large downloads... most of the "time" is probably just people downloading huge files in the background.
I'd guess that therefore AOL and Yahoo are the real biggies for time spent actually looking at stuff.
Where do you buy your groceries? How about your gas? 14 different major gas stations might actually be a tad high. Remember the article a few ....... ack, how long ago was that... the days are merging together (oops, now the days are merging too. what ever shall we do?)
Anyway, the article citing the concentration of big business... This is a surprise? Consolidation is a new thing? How many active distros are there for Linux right now? 14? Really? Raise of hands for Mandrake/Red Hat/Slackware/Debian/Suse? Did I miss anyone? (probably did and that will just serve to destroy my argument...).
How about your television shows? How many *major* stations are there? Certainly not 14...
And on and on and on... You see, consolidation is a fundamental principle. As the goals of a large group of people come closer together, the group merges, pools resources, and strives to better the achievement of the common goal.
Now perhaps this is a dangerous merge, but a surprise. Hardly...
Both AOL, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have other software that accesses their servers.
AOL has the AOL client, and is really more of a very large BBS than an ISP, some AOL users may hardly ever use the internet, they might just use the BBS services. A second point about AOL is that many people that don't use the official AOL might use AIM.
Yahoo! also has an instant messenger, which people probably leave connected while using the internet.
Microsoft has MSN, and who knows how many people use things like windows update and other "features" of windows that access Microsoft's servers.
Many people who use Napster probably just leave it connected so people could download files from them, also downloading MP3s can take a long time.
These results do not really reflect the actual usage of the websites.
cnn -> aol
terraserver -> ms
hotmail -> ms
ussearch -> yahoo
infospace -> ms
four11 -> yahoo
mapquest -> yahoo?
egroups -> yahoo
netscape -> aol?
I'm sure there are many more. These are just the ones I've used.
Instead of learning to adapt, they just assimilate.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
... is that this is happening *everywhere*. After the AOL / Time Warner debacle, the shutting down of the various baby DSL's, the increased push by Microsoft for dominance at the server /desktop/pocket pc level... we're getting way too 1984. Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer indeed.
We get all of our content in one place, because it's quick and it's easy. The sad thing is, all the cool stuff slips between the cracks. It's kinda like radio these days: you can get decent sounding blandness on any radio station, but good luck getting Tom Waits. Updated for today: you can get an easy OS installed free, but stability is gonna be a bitch to get your hands on. Or, for this new survey: you can get your news and your content at CNN and Yahoo!, but you're going to get one narrow viewpoint - McContent, if you will.
...