In an article today on GigaOM.com the author discusses the concept of how browsing HTML based sites is shrinking as a percentage. Although the Internet is used as a conduit for connecting users to content and software, the number of folks actually browsing random websites is definitely shrinking. Gigaom does passively discount the idea that browsing may soon be dead, with the cavelier phrase “it’s complicated” in their title. However, there is no doubt users are basically pushed content these days. And, control of this medium is definitely in play.
Small, “mom&pop” websites are almost a thing of the past for receiving information. Google strongly favors large corporate sites in their feed. And, most users don’t even use a standard browser as they used to.
As stated in the 2010 article by Wired.com:
“Indeed, there has hardly ever been a fortune created without a monopoly of some sort, or at least an oligopoly. This is the natural path of industrialization: invention, propagation, adoption, control.”
GigaOM writes…
As more and more apps become multibillion-dollar businesses — from WhatsApp and Instagram to SnapChat and Slack — it’s tempting to see them as replacing the web, or taking over from it. This helps explain the periodic outbreak of articles about how “the web is dying,” like the one Christopher Mims wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal. But the truth is that, as is often the case when someone says a certain kind of behavior is dying, it’s a lot more complicated than such headlines suggest.
In his piece, Mims repeats many of the same arguments we’ve heard before about how apps have come to dominate our activity as mobile usage has grown. Instead of using web browsers, we go to task-specific apps, and these are in many cases “walled gardens” that benefit a single corporation and don’t play well with others — either in terms of the data they collect or in terms of links to other sites:
“Everything about apps feels like a win for users — they are faster and easier to use than what came before. But underneath all that convenience is something sinister: the end of the very openness that allowed Internet companies to grow into some of the most powerful or important companies of the 21st century.”
The “web is dying” meme has been around since at least 2010, when Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson wrote a feature entitled The Web is Dead: Long Live the Internet, which talked about the rise of apps for services like Facebook, Twitter, Pandora and Netflix. It warned about the move from “the wide-open Web to semi-closed platforms” and called the web “an adolescent phase subsidized by industrial giants.
The web pie is growing
There were a number of problems with the Wired story, however — including the fact that the chart it used contrasted the growth of video traffic with the decline of “web” traffic, even though most of that video traffic was coming from websites and web-based services like YouTube, Hulu and Netflix. But the phenomenon it was describing was definitely a real thing, and in fact has only accelerated with the growth of apps like Instagram and WhatsApp, which don’t even have traditional websites.
As Zach Seward at Quartz notes, the Mims piece makes a common mistake by implying that the size of the web pie is finite — in other words, that mobile apps are stealing market share or user attention from the open web or the traditional browser, and therefore the web is dying. But the size of the web pie is arguably still growing rapidly, which suggests that apps are stealing attention from other things, including various kinds of offline activity.
How to translate
What Wired, and GigaOM writers both miss is how this monopoly of technology will manifest itself.
Again, from the Wired.com article – “Take railroads. Uniform and open gauge standards helped the industry boom and created an explosion of competitors — in 1920, there were 186 major railroads in the US. But eventually the strongest of them rolled up the others, and today there are just seven — a regulated oligopoly. “
This would suggest vendors are purposely turning our heads, and feeding information in a way they deem best for their business. However, they are certainly not so insightful as to intentionally lead us down this new path. It’s rather a bi-product of corporate branding. Right now the demand for brand management, and legal council to enforce copyrights, are huge. It’s routine to have several online marketing managers policing anyone from affiliates and partners to simple content rich sites like the one you’re reading now. They report up, and the legal team throws down the hammer, followed by Google deciding to update technology and policy. Movement from browsing to app’s and push technology comes from consumers not receiving anything of value from HTML sites as a result.
I remember a day when Napster was unchecked, content sites published anything and emailed anyone with impunity, and forums like Craigslist had a come-one-and-all mentality. This, however, flew under the radar as so many technically retarded among us in big corporations caught up. I doubt many can even remember the past. It’s complicated? Not really.
Read more about this on GigaOM.com, WSJ.com, and Wired.com.
