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Where the Online Traffic is Going
vitaly.friedman writes "While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information. The dramatic success of those Internet categories is apparent from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix, which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year."
it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information.
Local information sites ARE growing. Sites like Bloomingpedia (city wiki for Bloomington, Indiana) are getting lots of new articles, editors and interest from people all over the place. There are also other city wikis starting to pop up here and there and I just started the first State Wiki for Indiana last week to help centralize information about the DST change here.
I think a lot of people are starting to get there information from wikis in general because they are showing up so high in searches for information. In just the past couple months, we've been getting lots of search requests for restaurants around Bloomington.
I guess this is the evolution of information on the internet. First it was "fan websites" in the 90s, then directories of information, now localized wikis and blogs.
You don't need a research paper to tell you where the traffic is going.
Check out Alexa's Society Category. It's rife with the named blogging machines and even Slashdot!
All the report provides is the sheer visiting numbers and the rate of increase over the past year. And give proof that Tom over at MySpace is laughing all the way to the bank. You may call me a karma whore but that man has 68475709 friends!
My work here is dung.
There is a reason for this, google is a superior searchengine, putting aside the regular flamewars on 'evil or not' they offer a better service than their competitors, this is why they are continuing to grow, additionally basically everywhere you look you see something related to google these days, even the whole china upcry, all publicity is good publicity.
The reason for growth with the other sites is because of basic marketing treads they are cool, they are new, myspace has grown because they offered a unique service that people picked up on, blogging is also a major area of growth the fact that blogger.com is tied to google is a likely reason why they are going better than a lot of their competitors, as for wikipedia, it is a one stop shop for all your information needs that and it has a great google ranking it is an unsual day for me to perform a search on something contained in wikipedia and not have that entry returned on the first page.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
I, for one, welcome our new Blogger overlords.
It seems to me that this represents that the internet is maturing. A couple of years ago, it was mainly used as new way to do things we already used to do. i.e. read news, yellow pages, correspond, shop (this one may be a stretch). However, blogs and social networking are new thing that the internet has made possible. These sites are growing because this form of communication is growing. Such activities were not possible before the internet, but now, as it matures, new communication phenomena are emerging. Heady days, indeed.
Perhaps, but World of Warcraft is ushering in a whole new generation. So the lapse is temporary, at best.
I don't think these sites would do as well if people realized the exposure and danger they risk by volunteering so much personal information on the internet. There is a great deal of education which should accompany this growth.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Right now, to Washington Post :)
When I joined Wikipedia (July, 2003) it had just broken into Alexa's top 1000. Since then, the traffic has doubled every quarter, meaning that it has jumped over 900 places in less than three years (it was at 18 last I checked), and traffic has grown by several orders of magnitude. This article lumps Wikipedia in with blogging, social networking, and local information, but I don't think any of those categories are appropriate. It's a general reference - it just happens to be a particilarly good one, delivering a service that you will not find on Myspace, Blogspot, or a local newspaper site.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
It looks like places like http://www.politicalkitchen.com/ - VLOG as well as more Google like weather services, like that of http:www.weather.net are ones to watch. Just succinct in character. They grow organically. We like that!
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
People want more specific information about their various interests. No longer do they just surf the web for stories that corporate entities write, they want to hear from REAL people and REAL opinions.
People are tired of being force-fed information that they may or may not deem useful and have no way of responding to that information.
Blogs and related ventures will be much more popular than corporate-only websites, and that is a good thing indeed.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Is this something else that is supposed to be news? Huge "super-sites", the website equivalents of multi-national corporations (Yahoo, Aol, MSN) have slower growth rates than new sites with much smaller userbases. 5% Growth in usage of Yahoo.com is still HUGE, when you look at the numbers. That's nearly 6 million more users, which is about 1/5 of Myspace's entire userbase!
This whole article seems to be stating the obvious. Trendy sites are growing quickly. Huge sites are growing not so quickly. Useful sites continue to grow at a steady (fast) rate. Is there something shocking, or newsworthy, mentioned here?
"If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter." -Terry Pratchet, on Popcorn.
Freecycle lets you give or get free stuff in your community with minimal effort.
It's very important that each Freecycle node is geographically localized, e.g. one city, so that you're offering/accepting only to/from people for whom the offer is geographically practical. For this application, the internet does not annihilate geography, it only minimizes other transaction costs of offering/accepting free stuff ... but that's plenty of benefit!
Example: Seattle-area uses http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freecycleseattle/
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
And CitySearch is big-time now? What's next, Starwave? Pathfinder?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Just a couple of months ago i visited this page http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500. The ranking now has altered more than expected. Google should have been on the top of the top list, but also think about the research done by comScore Media. Let us take a look at some of the networking sites like http://www.blogger.com/ and http://www.hi5.com/. These site is much popular in the Asian countries like India and China. Huh ... the population matters ... that too to take part freely.
I bet it will increase more ... let it ...
Is this any surprise? Really?
Humans are social animals, isolated geeks not withstanding. We have always loved interaction with others. Back in the Commodore/Apple II days, BBSes were extrememly popular. Then came national/global entities like America On-Line and Prodigy. The message and chat areas were enormous draws to those entities. Of course, Usenet replaced BBSes when the Internet became the rage, but people were then turned off by spam and trolls.
So, now blogging and other social web sites have replaced BBSes, AOL, Prodigy, and Usenet as social gathering places. Eventually something will replace blogs. Am I the only one who finds this to be anything other than a surprise worthy of a Slashdot headline?
Been to MySpace or Blogger lately? If anything, those sites are a testament to the Internet's immaturity.
As long as this is a new story on Slashdot, all the web traffic will be diverted to the Washington Post.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
What I find most interesting about this trend, is that "social" interaction carried out online is world-knowable. Anyone who wants to look at, use, or even track what you do online, can do so. It's not like going to a party for a drink and then leaving for the day- it's like going to a party and having everything you do etched in stone so that a nice little memento can haunt you forever.
It will be most interesting to see how much fallout those who participated in sites like MySpace will endure as a result.
Rupert Murdoch paid $580mil for it... he thought it was cool.
Myspace as of Feb. 2006 has 54mil accounts.
180k more accounts daily...
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/myspace.htm (yeah whateva, thats my source)
Anyways... yes. The internet is changing, as users are given the ability to share opinions more freely and the average user begins to value those opinions more and more, the internet effectively becomes more human.
After all, an article posted by a professor is a bit more raw than one shoved past the noses of countless editors at MSN.
...
It seems like we've seen a drop in slashdot numbers in the past few months. I've also seen drops at the local stores and at the local restaurants. Are people starting to have their debt catch up with them, decreasing their available time spent online or doing things they like to do? Or is there really some odd social network change going on?
My blogs have seen a decent increase in traffic over the 4-5 months I've been writing them. When they were e-mail newsletters (opt-in only), I had about 8000 readers, most of which have NOT returned to my blogs on a daily basis. As more people learn how to use RSS feeds properly, though, I'm starting to see more feedburner access than ever before (about a 400% increase in 3 months).
I'm amazed at the amount of traffic that is generated in short time with very little promotion, but I am also amazed at the blogs I read daily. The quality of many of them on my regular feed list is second-to-none! In fact, I can't even read the news anymore since it is all canned newswire feeds it seems. I just did this search at news.google.com and if the link is valid for others, it shows pages and pages of the exact same article at dozens of news papers. Boring.
Do people really prefer to be preached to as a choir from people with their same opinions? If so, will tomorrow's news networks serve only a la carte instead of packaged news as previous models had?
That's something that surprises me, actually: slashdot regulars here want a la carte cable channels, a la carte news, and a la carte lifestyles, but most prefer pre-packaged politicians. If we could just change that last part to being a la carte, I'd say we'd see the best social network change.
...of the same bull crap. You can only view msn.com so long before you figure out how to change your default website. There's also lots of sites being advertised on TV, which pulls people away from the "old" standard websites.
and no, i didn't RTFA.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
I run www.TampaForums.com and www.TampaRacing.com, both local based social networks. We have been doubling in traffic every year. We are currently averaging around 13,000-15,000 uniques a day. Which is pretty neat since the websites are only geared towards a single city.
It also brings new issues to the table for site admins. Most of the people who view these websites know each other, and meet on a regular basis. Lot's more drama, and real world type scenarios happen on these local based websites.
I built a pretty simple blog/mashup last week in a few hours (www.mustseeblog.com) and it got from day one so much attention (+10,000 hits, the first weekend). It was never that easy to get so much attention with that small effort.
"With the vast userbase of MySpace and Facebook, how often do you hear of malicious use of the users' information?"
I hear about it more often than the "evening news" tells you.
"You can don your tin foil hat if you must, but for the most part, society isn't out to get YOU . You're just not that important. "
It's not "society" one needs to worry about. It's the maladjusted individuals who prey on others. Oddly enough these individuals refuse to wear the name tags offered like "sick bastard", and "serial killer". They even have the nerve to look like the rest of us.
"Of course, Identity theft is a whole different matter. Handing out Account Information, Passwords, and SS #'s is dangerous, and people should be educated on those matters, but for the average Joe, having their address published online, along with their interests and job details, isn't that big of a deal."
Try reading "Database Nation sometime. There's power in aggregation.
That's ridiculous. How many serial killers target people out of myspace? How many target out of a phone book? How many target out of genetics (eye color, race, etc). I've yet to hear about the abundance of rape and killing on myspace or facebook, due to putting personal information out there.
Not everyone lives life paranoid of what's around when you turn off the lights...
Right now, all the traffic is going to the alexa society page. 3 slashdot effect.
Blogging and social networking sites feed our society's need for three things. For the Bloggers it feeds our need for attention and validation. As a blogger, I readily admit to that. For the readers, it gives us glances into the lives and minds of others feeding the voyeuristic tendancy that reality television has brought out in our culture. How else can you explain the popularity of sites like http://dooce.com/, a site where Dooce writes about her everyday life? Just like the rise of reality shows that follow around regular people 24/7, blogging feeds the inner voyeur in all of us. Finally, the social networking sites make us feel connected to other people, a need often unfulfilled in real life where we work all day and never really connect with anyone. Speaking of connected, I have a Myspace message...
No animals were harmed in the making of this sig.
Well, there was that one puppy, but he is all better now.
so long as people remain enthusiastic about being the building blocks of web site content, i.e. wikipedia, why on earth would a web author choose any other route? oh and uh, check out GamerFaces.com ;)
The study measured relative growth rates. Small things grown at a larger percentage than smaller things. "Fastest growing" is a claim often used as a marketing tool by small organizations to sound impressive. If my website gets 2 hits per month and now goes to 10 hits/month, I've grown 500%! Wow!
Currently hooked on AMP
If that was true, no one would watch TV anymore.
"It seems reasonable to assume that useful sites will get lots of hits. Sites such as Mapquest and Wikipedia get hits, because they're very useful to quickly get information that used to require a lot of time and effort. They're simple examples of how amazingly useful the internet can be."
No they're proof of how "amazingly useful" digital information can be. Mapping programs and encyclopedias on DVD's have been around for years and are popular items. The only thing the internet brings to the table is remaining current. The other thing they bring is a dependency on an Internet connection (that CAT5 entension cord running from my car is a pain).
Where-ever /. tells it to go, of course. :)
Procrastination Man strikes again!
it depends if they use their real name and standard email address really.. it's quite possible to still stay anonymous if you want - even if you put up a picture of yourself, how likely is it that someone you know will find you out of the millions of other users? I personally dont mind others seeing what I do online, though may get a little embarrassed at some things, and sometimes do have to catch myself thinking "wait a minute, my family/friends can see this", hehe..
which is totally what she said
"Total information grows faster than human population (for now) and it's easily duplicated, so the finite space of each human skull gets a greater diversity of information than ever in history. If information is a prime driver of culture, then "cultural diffusion" should occur; mainstream culture should shrink as fringe cultures spawn and grow."
y =the_cultural_diffusion
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme?entr
The day your mother gets a blog, is the day you realize blogging has jumped the shark.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Or you can have multiple online identies. Church Lady for the Family/Employers and Sister Cistern for fun!
I drank what? -- Socrates
I agree with you in theory, but here's something to consider: ten years ago when people were happily participating in usenet discussions, bearing it all in some cases, few if any ever anticipated the persistence that this online material now has. Few people anticipated that a telephone service provider would stoop so low as to entertain the idea of selling call-related information to third parties - or that a city government would be selling information pertaining to your drivers' license. What's to stop companies from including identities used on your various accounts along with other information they sell?
Stop right there, the last time I heard World of warcraft and Porn in the same conversation, it ened up in a very bad place. You just don't want to know what a discussion about cow porn sounds like, and we wern't even drunk.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Tracing route to slashdot.org [66.35.250.150]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 2 ms 192.168.1.254
2 35 ms 35 ms 35 ms 82.224.5.254
3 35 ms 35 ms 35 ms nice-3k-1-a5.routers.proxad.net [213.228.12.254]
4 93 ms 39 ms 37 ms marseille-6k-1-v800.intf.routers.proxad.net [212.27.50.97]
5 42 ms 42 ms 43 ms lyon-6k-1-v804.intf.routers.proxad.net [212.27.50.102]
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 48 ms * * cbv-6k-1-po7.intf.routers.proxad.net [212.27.50.26]
8 48 ms 48 ms 48 ms if-7-0.core2.PG1-Paris.teleglobe.net [80.231.73.17]
9 * * * Request timed out.
13 133 ms 133 ms 133 ms ix-12-0.core2.AEQ-Ashburn.teleglobe.net [209.58.27.46]
14 133 ms 133 ms 144 ms bcs1-so-1-1-0.Washington.savvis.net [206.24.227.105]
15 146 ms 154 ms 147 ms dcr1-so-3-0-0.Atlanta.savvis.net [204.70.192.53]
16 170 ms 170 ms 170 ms dcr1-so-3-2-0.dallas.savvis.net [204.70.192.82]
17 208 ms 208 ms 209 ms dcr2-so-2-0-0.LosAngeles.savvis.net [204.70.192.86]
18 208 ms 208 ms 209 ms dcr1-as0-0.LosAngeles.savvis.net [204.70.192.117]
19 208 ms 217 ms 208 ms dcr2-so-2-0-0.SanFranciscosfo.savvis.net [204.70.192.90]
20 209 ms 210 ms 209 ms bhr1-pos-0-0.SantaClarasc8.savvis.net [208.172.156.198]
21 210 ms 210 ms 210 ms csr1-ve243.santaclarasc8.savvis.net [66.35.194.50]
22 212 ms 212 ms 212 ms 66.35.212.174
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * ^C
Long and bumpy, the road to slashdot is...
I don't believe a word of this story. We've all seen the reports, over the past several months and they prove this one to be patently false. All the other stories have already stated unequivocally that, greater than 50% of all internet traffic is spam and greater than 50% of all internet traffic is porn. That's more than 100%. So there's no bandwidth left over for anythingelse. Most especially blogs!
SNES all the way.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
myspace has grown because they offered a unique service that people picked up on
Remember Friendster? That was around long before Myspace, but it didn't take off. Maybe it was better marketing or a fluke...
But Myspace wasn't the first nor was it unique.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I guess we know now why obesity rates are sky rocketing. Get off your duffs you sorry fat arses!
What do you think of tools like [Alexa]? Are the numbers even representative of slashdot traffic?
social sites and those that let people do something like measuring their thought speed are getting more popular. big media sites don't have this relevancy and so the flurry for relevancy and focus.
I thought that was a little thing called the Data Protection Act? At least here in the UK. I think you're allowed to sell depersonalised information for use in statistics, but not to include personal information like addresses etc - I'm guessing when you tick little checkboxes like 'I would like to recieve more information/correspondence from blah blah' that maybe then they sell your information to other people. I guess some companies may not comply with the law, but in reality I'm not worried about slashdot or amazon giving away my account details to third parties
which is totally what she said