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?
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
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..
... 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
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.
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.
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...
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...