US, Asia, Europe Ceding Web Dominance

An anonymous reader writes "A new study shows that presence of the US, Asia, and Western European countries on the web is strongly declining. Newly internet-empowered countries are booming; many geographical regions are showing exponential growth, including Eastern Europe and South America. Chris Harrison explains: 'Countries that have never been able to place a website in the top 500 are now pushing dozens of established websites out of this prestigious list. This trend is both recent (within the last two years) and accelerating. Interestingly, Asia is seeing it's presence eroded the fastest, especially China.'"

Comments

Re:Not really surprising

[smallfries]

It is not really suprising that statistics can be made to say anything that you want. It would be suprising if the web presence of the US / Europe / Asia was in decline. What could cause this momentous change in direction? Is this a new trend that could change the face of the world as we know it???

Err, no. It's just some twat pumping traffic to his site. So lets look at what he's done shall we:
      * Traffic is declining to first-world web domains!!!
No, not true. The relative share of domains in the top-500 has decreased. Overall traffic and numbers of domains are still increasing. Ahh, so what is being measured as a "top-500" site? Obviously we can bias this any way we want. Does it explain anywhere on the site how this measurement is performed.... no.

      * All URL's are geographically based!!!
No, .com does not imply an American company. So the shift in traffic from generic TLD's to country code TLD's for sites in this mythical "top-500" could be explained by a change in presence. That companies no longer want a generic TLD for a "global presence" and instead want a national image. That would be an interesting explanation of the "data", but no, lets go for a screaming headline to pump up traffic in our slashvertisment.

      * Believe what I've told you!!!
We have bold claims about traffic to a wide range of internet domains. There is no description on the site of how the data is gathered. Is this opt-in traffic reporting? Does this guy happen to own a large amount of internet infrastructure? Is it one of the largest benign bot-nets in existence? Or is it the answer behind door D...

Complete, and utter, bullshit.