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Modeling Linking on the Web
An Anonymous Coward writes "Amazon has a much greater market share among online bookstores compared to the greatest market share for offline stores. How is this possible? Because the web changes how people find information. There are millions of links to Amazon on the web, which makes it more likely for people to find Amazon when surfing the web, or when using search engines which typically use link popularity in ranking. This makes it harder for new businesses to compete. Researchers have discovered that across the entire web, links are distributed according to a "power law" which leads to "rich get richer" or "winner's take all" behaviour where a small number of sites get the vast majority of links and traffic. A new study just released by NEC shows that this behaviour varies in different communities, and shows how to predict competition in different areas. For example, you can see how much tougher competition is among booksellers compared to photographers."
Amazon does a lot to get their name out. So its very reasonable that most people would tend to look towards them for books.
Ask people off the street where they would buy books on the internet... and your bound to get many replies of Amazon or "I don't know".
I suppose by their logic that the only place to be on the web is AOL... but on the street you could get that response as well.
Advertising does pay. Links on the net may lean towards one provider over another, but most of them were bought by one method or not.
One reason the rich get richer is because they are optimist, they are willing to do it now. The best time to start a business is always TODAY... the best time to get your name out there is ALWAYS today.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This is also called a scale-free network, and the research on it, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (currently at Notre Dame U) is in this week's New Scientist. (Apologies, it's not on their site yet - www.newscientist.com) He's applied it to many systems other than the web as well, from viral transmission on the net and human populations to the vulnerability of "hubs" in genetics (a few, like p53) would take out damn near everything due to their pervasiveness and even quantum mechanics.
toeslikefingers.com - because
When Google hit the scene, search absolutely sucked so there's was an existing scratch that needed itching and to scratch that itch, all you did was search from a different page.
So the user got a massive reward from a tiny change. But with Amazon, there's not that much pain in the mind of the online consumer. One-click ordering. Recommendations. Reviews. A very usable site by many standards.
But switching from Amazon to another bookstore requires a good amount of hassle... MUCH more effort than switching search engines and offers a much smaller reward than Google offered to frustrated internet searchers.