World Wide Web "Shrinking"

An anonymous reader wrote in "According to this article in the LA Times, the web is "contracting." No, the number of sites is not decreasing, but web users are visiting the same sites more often & other sites less often. Interesting. The article has some good stats. "

Comments

Well, it was bound to happen eventually

[fable2112]

You see, there's a hell of a lot of JUNK out there on the web. And eventually people with a given interest are going to get tired of hitting every site they can on a given topic. They don't want junk, they want actual information on whatever subject(s) they're interested in.

I no longer try to look at every SCA or Amber page going. I keep track of my own barony and kingdom pages, and sometimes things like the Rialto archives and Cariadoc's Miscellany, because I KNOW those are good sources of info that are going to be there tomorrow.

Likewise, sometimes I'll hit "random" on the Golden Circle, but not always. Some of those pages are really useless. I check those that are updated frequently.

And yes, I'm a slight bit of a hypocrite, but until I can get my stuff off of GeoCities, I'm not updating it. :P

"The" top 50? No, but how about your OWN top 50?

[Tackhead]

While "data" is not the plural of "anecdote", I'm not sure the web is shrinking, but my web has shrunk drastically. I believe this to be a generalized phenomenon, which can be expressed as follows: the size-of-ones-view-of-the-web is inversely proportional to time spent surfing it.

My first experience of the WWW was in 1993/4. My first impression was "this is just like FTP or Gopher, but it decodes .GIFs and uses nice fonts!". There were only a few sites up, and I navigated everywhere from site to site, just seeing what was out there - content didn't matter as much as the novelty of going from one site to another with the click of a mouse.

Over the next year, people invented, and I discovered, search engines. "Cool! I can type in keywords and get something reasonably related to what I'm looking for!" Maybe my friend had put up a site with links to his friends' sites. Many "sites" were merely lists of links that the owner found interesting. Random surfing was still king. There was a wonderful War Games-esque feeling to be had from typing "let's play global thermonuclear war" into a window and getting results back that pointed to .mil sites :-)

Over time, I found myself visiting certain sites more often - they got bookmarked. I used a search engine as my default home page, but still spent most of my time feeding it interesting words to see what would come back, or words pertaining to technical questions to see if I could find answers.

Flash forward to today - I now find myself visiting only a handful of sites daily. Slashdot for tech news, a couple of major commercial media sites for local/national coverage, a financial site to get business news, and that's about it. I don't like watching the same news footage ten times during the evening TV news broadcast; why would I want to read the same news story ten times a day? There was an earthquake in Turkey. A buncha people died. What can FooNews tell me about that that BarNews won't?

I can count the number of sites I visit on a daily basis on one hand. I can count the total number of sites I visit on a typical day using both hands.

I suspect I'm not alone. Your stereotypical chatroom pornhound - does he really need to visit 2000 porn sites a day? Can he keep track of 50 "chat through the web" sites a day? No. He'll find one or two that he likes, and stick with them until he gets bored and moves on. A soccer mom - maybe a "moms with kids" bulletin board, and a few news sites. Her kid - a few entertainment sites, maybe the high school's forum page, and porn after he's disabled the censorware.

For most interactive sites, you find a community and then stay there until you find something more interesting. If the content is sufficiently compelling, (e.g. /.), you stay forever. Most other sites are static; a corporation's press releases occur weekly/monthly, and any given "this is my dog" page (which might be interesting to you if it's your best friend's dog!) can only be expected to change every few months, as most people don't change their families/pets/lifestyles on a daily basis - in either case, why waste time visiting a static site daily, since 90% of the time, nothing will have changed?

I doubt that I'm a regular visitor to more than 2 or 3 of the top 50 sites. I doubt I'll ever visit more than 10-20 of 'em. But I do know that - compared to my old days, where I'd surf to dozens of sites in a random walk through the web in an afternoon - well over 90% of the traffic on port 80 associated with my top 50 sites.

Am I alone?

Misleading Balderdash!

[cfulmer]

So, I actually went and *looked* at the mediametrix web site, and saw their list of the top-50 web sites. Note the following observations:

1. Sites #2, #3, & #4 are AOL, MSN and Geocities -- sites where individuals can put up their own web pages.

2. Out of the top 10 sites, 5 are primarily search engines (yahoo, go, lycos, excite, angelfire).

3. Another 2 of the top sites, netscape.com and microsoft.com are (I believe) the default start page for two very popular browsers.

4. The first e-commerce site is amazon.com, at #11 with barnesandnoble.com at #35. The second most-popular commerce site is ebay.com

5. Free-email sites, such as hotmail.com (and yahoo.com) are prominent in the top 50.

6. The first 'news' site is msnbc, at #24, followed by zdnet at #26, pathfinder at #28, wather.com at #30, cnn.com at #31.

7. There are a few unexpected entries -- passport.com (????), ivillage.com ? Lends to questioning how broad of a sample the study used.

So, I would argue that the following are more adequate conclusions:

** Many of the most popular web sites are used only to find other websites -- either as search engines or start pages.

** The sites that provide access for user webpages, such as aol, msn and geocities, are very popular -- meaning that lots of people are doing their own web pages.

So, I would argue that rather than a contraction in web sites, we're actually seeing an expansion -- sure the number of companies hosting these sites is pretty compact, but there's a lot of interest in what amateurs are putting on the net! AOL was able to beat the pants off Amazon, BarnesandNoble, ebay and expedia, COMBINED, just by allowing their users to publish their own web pages!

The fact that the search engines are so popular indicates that many people are visiting sites that aren't the big popular ones (those are typically already bookmarked, or obvious: cnn.com).

So, rather than saying that 'the web is contracting', with the connotation of usage on the web shifting toward a few sites, I'd argue that it's expanding because individual people are creating sites and other people are visiting those sites *more* than they are most of the 'mainline' sites.

Is /. one fo the top 50 sites?

[Hobbex]

Cause if it isn't, I can't remember hitting one of the top 50 sites in the last month (if cnn.com doesn't count). And reading slashdot tends to diversify my surfing, since I get sent off all over the place to read the articles (first time at LA-Times this month).

I think it is to early in the developement of the web to start pointing at these trends. Most people are still relative newbies, and tend towards the big sites they know.

My experience is the opposite, new people to the web hit sites like yahoo and the search engines all the time, while people who are used to the web almost never touch them (and when they do they use the better but less fancy ones like Google and alltheweb).

It's only a matter of time

[grappler]

before the only sites with more than 1000 hits/day will be Slashdot, News sites, Disney, Microsoft, and Porno, Warez, and mp3 sites.

And then of course the search engines to help you find Slashdot, News sites, Disney, Microsoft, and Porno, Warez, and mp3 sites.

Re:Unconvincing

[Forrest J. Cavalier]

Yeah, I hate the lack of traceable statistics....It's just another "dumbed down" article for the masses that makes it hard for us geeks to figure out what really is going on.

One Q: Is that 35% of the same size pie from year to year? Probably not....

There are ways of doing the data collection, though. Check out
http://www.hot100.com/.

If you want to know how /. is doing try
http://www.hot100.com/dev/

Forrest J. Cavalier III, Mib Software Voice 570-992-8824
The Reuse RocKeT: Efficient awareness for software reuse: Free WWW site
lists over 6000 of the most popular open source libraries, functions, and applications.

Re:Statistical effect?

[DonkPunch]

> How many "This is my dog" websites can you go and see without exploding?

10,372 according to the late Dr. Sebastian Markoff. :)