2010.44 The Web is dead? Is Wired right or just good at headlines?
I’ll go with the headline option as the other point is nuanced.
The article in question starts with “Who’s to blame?” Chris Anderson takes the ” us” argument with Michael Wolff blaming “them”. The title on the cover, asking whether the Web is dead, is clearly an attention getter, but the related articles are very thoughtful.
What points stuck with me – for those who haven’t read the article (and those who did and may want to discuss related thoughts). I’ll break my argument up by discussing Anderson’s points first.
Anderson is making a distinction between closed systems on the Internet and the Web itself. We have moved over the past few years from search engines and the broader web to semi-closed systems such as Pandora and Facebook. The screen comes to the user, not the other way around; so these systems often provide a better experience. He also resurrected the “push” concept which I remember so clearly when first discussed in the mid to late 1990’s. Now push comes in the form of APIs, apps and the Smartphone.
Content delivered via browser currently only accounts for a quarter of Web traffic and the number is still dropping. Increasingly traffic consists of peer-to-peer file transfers, email, company VPNs, the machine-to-machine communications of APIs, Skype, World of Warcraft and other online games, Xbox live, iTunes, VOIP phones, iChat and Netflix movie streaming. Shifts are accelerating and Anderson quotes Morgan Stanley as saying that within five years the number of people accessing the Net from mobile devices will exceed those using a PC. Phones have a smaller screen; traffic is often accessed not through a browser but specialty software (a closed or semi-closed system).
Results? A pressure for profits from these “walled gardens” and monopolies. Ah, monopolies. Networks are more monopoly prone, Anderson claims; using Metcalfe’s law, that the value of a network increases in proportion to the square of connections, a winner takes all market is created. As Facebook’s user base grows more people are drawn to it because that is where they can find the largest number of their friends (and they miss out if they aren’t thus connected).
The victory of convenience over openness? People are often choosing quality over free, yet also appreciate choice. Some watch content and others create it.
According to Anderson, “The Internet is the real revolution, as important as electricity; what we do with it is still evolving.”
To sum up some of Wolff’s key points, online power blocks are real due to concentrated user numbers. He references some statistics from Compete, a Web analytics company, which says that the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31% of US page views in 2001, 40% in 2006 and about 75% in 2010. Big dominates; and those related companies control enormous numbers of people.
An example he sites is Google, who he analogizes to being like the only movie distributor, who also owns all of the movie theatres. Google may stand for open systems and level architecture but it also heavily dominates its space. Disruptive business models and the breakdown of incumbent power structures are only one part of the Web. Struggles for control are another.
Content companies had to face their own disruption online. Wolff points out that the Web was built by engineers and not editors. HTML-constructed Web sites aren’t the best as an advertising medium. While growth initially masked the resulting revenue generation crisis it has become clear to all now. Ads can be tracked online but we also know how many consumers ignore them.
Wolff states that the online audience is a fraud. He says that nearly 60% of people find websites from search engines, driven by search engine optimization (skewed results based on the related algorithm). And, as Web audiences have gotten larger, the quality of those audiences has dropped. Hence companies such as DemandMedia produce ever cheaper content for audiences that don’t want to pay for it (a spiraling that leads to less and less valued content).
Those coming from the media side don’t typically know technology and vice versa (as an aside, I recently met the CEO of a local tech based content distribution company who made movies before going to grad school – I was thrilled). But then Wolff brought in Steve Jobs…who aligned himself with media interests and found one solution.
Further points are to be found in the pages of Wired Magazine’s September issue
George Gilder, in his newsletter dated Friday, August 27 titled “Wired Weirds Out”, criticized the Anderson/Wolff articles. (Free sign-up at http://earth.lyris.net/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?join=gilder-technology-report). I’m never one to easily argue with George Gilder! I think the essential disagreement with the respect to the two positions is that Wired gave the walled gardens too much credit for displacing the broader web. Gilder points out his nuance: the massive growth of usage/traffic and credits the online world with killing TV and the Internet. Essentially, the network needs to meet the continued increases in demand (and type of traffic) and no solution has thus far come forward (who pays…who controls the network…neutrality or not?). He also criticizes Wired for its extensive name dropping of media darling companies – and he’s right on that point.
All three pieces are worth reading. Gilder’s focuses more on the actual technology; the Anderson and Wolff pieces are more thought pieces – hence the attention getting title. Viewed in sum, we get insights onto the evolution of an industry – digital media – which continues to evolve. We may all be surprised with the results of that evolution.
