Krishwords

Nicholas Carr wrote an article on Guardian Unlimited about how more and more internet traffic is being sent to fewer and fewer sites. He compares data from 2001 to 2006 to argue his point. I think it is not right to make such a simplistic comparison and argue in favor of web consolidation among big players. The reasons for my argument against Carr’s thesis are

• 2001 was the so called Web 1.0 era and 2006 is Web 2.0 era. We have RSS aggregations, mashups, social bookmarks, etc playing a role than the erstwhile URL based system.
• In 2001, Google was a baby and now Google is a possible monopoly. The growth of Google was also a result of people’s habit changing from “using URL to visit a site” to “Googling a site”
• Myspace is not a single site. In a way, it represents millions of individual sites. It is like representing all sites hosted on a big hosting provider like “The Planet” to just a single site. Every individual’s site in Myspace is represents an individual and hence it should be counted as a private site of that individual than considering it as a component of single site called Myspace. These are individual “domains” hosted without an unique domain name. For this kinda analysis, you should consider the concept of Myspace as a backend to these individual sites than considering these individuals to be part of a single Myspace ecosystem
• Add to this other smaller issues like the general reluctance of people to click on unknown domain names for the fear of having a visit by FBI or other Federal agents, issues like website blocking in many countries like China, etc.

Taking all these factors into account, I wouldn’t say that we are moving into consolidation of web traffic to few big players. In fact, most of the top ten websites, mentioned in the Read/Write blog’s analysis, are just “facilitators or front door” for other smaller “individual sites”. It is premature to say that the Long Tail of the internet is shrinking.