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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.'"
This is not really surprising as the most population of the US was an early adapter. Now that the remaining world is getting hold of it, their presence is growing.
I noticed in Chris Harrison's website a lot of talk of "the rest of the world enters front and center stage" but while he discussed North America, Europe, Asia and South America, he didn't mention Africa at all. Any word on what's up with Africa and internet usage, let alone the most popular domains? I know little about this subject, but am curious now.
All the good .com names are taken and used for pay per click domain parking!
Dallas Real Estate
Developing world developing.
They're going, oh well, we're not gonna be doing this anyway, you can take over the internet for us?
they've probably been doing this "eroding" on their own, what with their having the world's most powerful national firewall and all. And I doubt they care very much whether the rest of us think their position in the Web is being eroded.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is really pointless. From TFA:
"Despite the Internet being a global network, the US has traditionally dominated."
Then later:
"The Internet is still dominated by the United States,"
In other words... Nothing has changed. Figures indicate Eastern Europe is now up to 1%, compared to the US, and South America is nearing 2%.
Good to see it happening, but this is statistical static, worthy of a one-sentence mention in the on-screen ticker of whatever stock/business news program you watch... A complete non-story.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The observation about China's slow internet growth is interesting - maybe their draconion Internet policies are starting to bite. Might this be an early sign of China hitting an economic glass ceiling imposed by their social policies?
The infrastructure is good here, but there is a monopoly carrier, Telkom. Bandwidth is so exorbitant overseas hosting is common. Unfortunately this is not likely to change soon. see http://www.hellcom.co.za/ for a Telkom hate site, or google "incompetent idiot", the first result is the one you want.
I remember seeing on a Bob Geldof docco that Africa is the largest growing market for mobile phone sales, and that mobile phone towers were popping up everywhere.
I don't know how factual that is though.
Yes, there are lots of people out there and some of them are actually getting those derned computing things with a real darned hookup to the InterWeb.
As the Internet is the ultimate flattener of the earth, there are no surprises here. What's interesting is that many thought that everything from google to ebay would dominate the world's commerce. Well, it did for a while, and naturally (lacking cultural adaptation to specific international markets) they're failing where other sites are now quite culturally adapted and are doing very well.
This will continue to occur until we understand more about each other's buying habits, distribution infrastructure and so on. Then, the best site wins, whether it's the next GooTube in China or Cabernet Wine site in Chile. My hopes: competition will continue to improve the bigger brands, keep them 'honest' and competitively priced.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I just thought I'd point out that .com, .org and .net are far from being US specific. In fact it's very common for non-english speaking websites to use those tlds.That and a lot of the top sites are multinationals that use their main tld to also host all their websites for the different countries they do business in.
.us becomes pretty much mandatory for american sites and .com is reserved for multinationals that aren't counted in any particular country, the figures given don't mean squat...
Factor in microsoft's pc domination and suddenly it becomes obvious that MS products and services are bound to appear at the top. Oh, and of course english being the main language for international exchanges, that just screws things a bit more.
Unless the
For creating the Internet, and for pushing the globalization to enrich the poor of the world to use it.
I'm holding the English edition of today's "The Japan Times", where it says: "Global economy best in 30 years".
We could do a lot better — various illiberals are holding us back — but we are still doing pretty well.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Dividing the world into the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia leaves some people out.
The good news is that there really isn't a limit to the Internet. I mean I suppose some day we will run in to physical limits on computing power/storage and thus run in to limits as to how much there can eventually be, but for now the net can grow as needed. Other countries having more does not imply the US will have less. In fact, it implies that everyone will have more since we all have access to it.
:P.
It stands to reason that, percentage wise, the US will start falling since it is getting somewhat saturated. If you get to the point that literally everyone has a web page (we aren't their yet but blogs are pushing that direction) where else is there to go? However that doesn't mean that the amount of US content or usage will be going down, just that it won't be going up at as fast a rate as elsewhere since it is near maximum.
As you said, whole lot of nothing. You can sum it up as "People like the Internet and usage continues to grow." Really? I never would have guessed
First of all, it is pure marketroid-type of BS to talk about "eroding" and "declining" "presence on the web", when in fact the links are to "Top 500" lists.
This gives the absolutely false impression as if the number of websites in US, Asia and Europe are _falling_, when in fact it is simply the number of websites in other regions that is catching up.
Secondly, thanks for putting in title "Europe is ceding web dominance" and then telling that Eastern Europe is on rise, showing to whoever may care that EEU is not part of Europe proper.
Of course Eastern Europe is making a better showing now! Now that the American versions are being forced off the interbutts, people are turning to our Russkie friends: crackz.ru, serialz.ru, and ALLOFFRIGGINMP3.COM.
Most prostitutes even here on the streets are from the Ukraine, so you can be sure that online, without the problem to come into the country first of all, it's even easier.
Face it, we lost the porn sector long, long time ago.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You kidding? Pretty much every corporation here is pushing jobs eastwards. Romania is the new land of the gold rush for our companies, with cheap labour, an ok stability and a legal system that gives you pretty much the green light for anything you might want to do.
Our companies just started shipping jobs away, but that doesn't mean they don't do it, it only means that they're (as usual) about 5-10 years behind the US.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
nothing wrong about those numbers, but the conclusion doesn't seem so conclusive.
during the early stage of the development, there will be multiple players, but as time goes on, we usually see a convergence. however, that does not necessarily mean a decline of the development. altough there is no boundary on the net, the web sites in north america, europe, and asia mainly focus on and serve their own market. so a growth in one region won't direclty lead to a decline in another. the conclusion about china also seems strange. the internet penetration and the total number of web sites are still jumping fast. the traffic trend only shows the distrubution of the usage. it has nothing to do with the status outside of the "box".
FTS: A new study shows that presence of the US, Asia, and Western European countries on the web is strongly declining.
No it's not, the % of total traffic that goes to these countries is declining. Harrison's page says nothing about the total amount of traffic over the period examined, so it's entirely possible that the absolute amount of traffic to these sites has risen.
Harrison's 'research', or at least the presentation thereof, stinks. He's playing with percentages to make the change seem more dramatic. The numbers on the front page don't add up, either.
Lies, damn lies and statistics, huh?
define "Web Dominance".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I am the author of the linked page and have enjoyed reading your comments. I have made an addendum that addresses a number of your points:
"It should be noted that these trends are only based on the rank of top 500 most visited websites. While providing a good snapshot of web activity, the data does not necessarily scale to the entire web. However, it does provide a reliable measure for sites that are utilized by a broad spectrum of the population, such as search engines or news providers. These, in turn, provide a fairly accurate measure of how connected a country is.
Also, this analysis is only looking at rank movement and not web traffic. This was purposeful. Web dominance is an effect of top sites jostling - these are the big players that can exert the most political and social influence. The pure number of websites is less interesting, as it is more of an effect of the economy (i.e. when money is flowing, people setup websites for personal and small business use). Additionally, indications are that traffic is growing across the board. Thus, the trends noted here are most likely from new countries growing faster than old players."
Basically, it doesn't matter how many websites you have, it's how many important websites you have. If the US, Asia and Western Europe loose their dominance in the top 500, they will have no leg to stand on when trying to wrangle the internet and its politics. You can already see the international community starting to put pressure on the US to open the net. It is clear that pressure is only going to increase as US dominance erodes.
Also, I want to reiterate how fast this is happening. In July 2004, US, Asian, and Western European domains controlled 96% of 500 top websites! By January 2007 (just two and a half years later), that number has dropped to below 80%. And, this trend seems to be accelerating.
Chris Harrison
I found the secret of life! But forgot to write it down...
I don't think so. Because now that the internet is becoming something that more and more people have in those countries, where they didn't have it before, of course it's going to make it look like countries that have had it much longer are losing web dominance. It's just a boom that's going to even out soonish and then we'll see where everyone stands before the next big thing comes.
This research is fundamentally flawed. Somehow Chris thought that all .com domain belong to U.S companies, which is very very not true. The result is a lot of other country's traffic are credited to U.S.
Just an example, Baidu.com, the search engine that has more market share in China then Google, is a top 10 worldwide traffic website. But it's counted as a U.S company in Chris's graph.
Of cause, this may or may not change the conclusion. But this research has some fundamental flaws on collecting data which make the result useless.