Web Travelers Follow Beaten Paths to Similar Sites
Ready for a shock? The World Wide Web--widely considered the ultimate exponent of diversity and choice--is contracting.
True, the number of Web sites continues to expand more rapidly than the universe at the moment after the Big Bang. But where are users actually traveling? More and more often to the same places, according to research conducted for The Times by Web-tracking companies. We are seeing a rapid narrowing of attention on the Web.
Of the several hundred million hours collectively spent surfing the Web in June, 35% of the time was passed on the 50 most popular sites--up sharply from about 27% a year earlier, according to Media Metrix, a New York-based research group. The top 10 sites claimed more than 19% of all time spent Web surfing. The data show a similar concentration when considering “page views,” a common tally of Web-site popularity, the group said.
“This seeming diversity and democracy is a little bit deceiving,” said Bernardo Huberman, a scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center who studies Internet traffic patterns. “It takes a lot to set up a site that is successful,” meaning one that attracts more than a handful of people.
New York-based Nielsen/NetRatings said the 10 mega-sites garnered 21% of all attention. Reston, Va.-based PC Data does not track America Online’s 18 million members, but it found that the top 10 sites attract the remaining Internet users with even more powerful magnetism--grabbing 32% of all time spent on the Web, with more than five minutes of every hour spent on industry leader Yahoo alone.
Moreover, this trend should continue and even accelerate, analysts say.
To be sure, the situation may not presage the kind of control enjoyed by Ma Bell before its dismemberment, the big three TV networks before cable or today’s Microsoft Corp. But it suggests that the idea of the Web as a guarantor of infinite choice and endless serendipity is hardly a divine right.
Does this rapid consolidation of “eyeballs,” as the industry calls users, actually threaten the vibrant democratizing force the Web symbolizes and often embodies?
Market imperatives are rapidly rationalizing the way people use the Web, but that’s not necessarily bad.
Portals--mega-sites such as Yahoo and Excite that offer one-stop malls for various combinations of search, news, business tools, shopping, entertainment and other services--emerged largely because people desperately need help navigating the chaos of the Web, said Doug McFarland, general manager of Media Metrix.
The progressive concentration of attention around a small number of portals may be an inevitable result of the Web’s rapid growth. As users become more experienced, they treat the Web less as a curiosity to explore and more as a tool, returning time and again to locations that offer the widest range of resources in the most accessible fashion. Portals solve the overload problem by offering manageable--that is, limited--choices.
After all, none of today’s search engines even attempts to check each of the Web’s 800 million-plus pages, though some have recently announced plans to do so eventually. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most popular search methods rely on human-constructed directories--effectively an extended word-of-mouth process.
Intrinsic social patterns reinforce that approach, according to Huberman. Xerox PARC research has shown that the tendency to cluster around a few sites is replicated within topical areas. For example, because of the pervasive influence of recommendations from friends or colleagues, the large majority of visits to education Web sites are made to 5% of such sites.
“What we really engaged in is a form of social search,” he said. “This process will tend to concentrate people’s visits and time to a few sites that become very popular.”
Despite such concentration, of course, the Web remains incredibly diverse. Nearly any search request, no matter how obscure, returns hundreds or thousands of hits.
That won’t change dramatically in the near term because the Web differs fundamentally from any other medium.
The cost of producing a small Web site is already near zero. And although the expense of a mega-site is vast, those sites differ from traditional media conglomerates in key ways. Yahoo calls itself a “global branded network,” but unlike a TV network Yahoo generates and controls little of its own content and ships you off to other destinations as a routine part of doing business.
The Web’s interactivity also offers a powerful hedge against monopolization. People can vote with their mouse clicks, organize their interests online or even build alternative information resources, unlike passive TV viewers.
“There’s always going to be a dissenting point of view,” McFarland says. Just as metropolitan newspapers never wiped out neighborhood weeklies, “other,” the generic label for sites that defy clear categorization, form the largest category on the Web. About 80% of Web users visit at least one of them in any given month.
Yet big media and technology companies have already snapped up or made sizable investments in many of the favored Web properties, particularly portals. Therefore, those entities increasingly mediate the online experience through the lowest common denominator.
The popular sites mimic one another in the range, presentation and style of content offerings as news and entertainment outlets cut deals with America Online, Excite, Yahoo and MSN.com, while BarnesandNoble.com copies or adapts Amazon.com’s techniques.
The narrowing focus means that mega-sites will dictate trends that emphasize convention while “dissenters”--like small newspapers and public-access cable--will ultimately wield little influence.
So despite its myriad differences, the dominant Web experience is assuming some of the stupefying blandness of other mass media. And like everything that operates on Internet time, the process is moving at a breathtaking pace. There’s a scary thought.
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Times staff writer Charles Piller can be reached at charles.piller@latimes.com.
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Web Watching
A relatively few Web sites are garnering most of the attention.
Percentage of total time spent on the Web
Top 100 sites
June 1998: 33.7%
June 1999: 39.4%
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Top 50 sites
June 1998: 27.3%
June 1999: 35.0%
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Top 10 sites
June 1998: 16.0%
June 1999: 19.2%
Source: MediaMetrix
