Slashdot Mirror
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. "
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?