comScore Stats: The Web Is Contracting

Which is why Google is pushing so hard for the "mobile experience" ..and why it is so important that sites look good and work well on mobile devices..especially phones and tablets..

Desktops will become pretty much limited to pro use only , ie; to make the content that will be consumed by the masses via mobile devices, with to a lesser degree web capable TV and media centres.

Didn't need to be Cassandra to see this coming from a long way off and to have been building and developing to be ready for it..

The signs have all been there ..for all to see..for a long long time.

that is the 2nd most powerful document I have read in the last 10 years. The other was the famous Wired, "web is dead" article. [wired.com...]

I can't say I disagree too much with the author of either of the articles, however Ben Elowitz makes a couple of points that few have read before. One very critical piece for webmasters to understand about the Google ecosystem:

Unlike the ecosystem set up by Google, where the search engine ironically intermediates between users and the objects of their queries (so that users reinforce their loyalty to Google, far more than to the publisher), in the world of social publishing, the Facebook hub enables a direct, if constrained, relationship between users and media brands.

It is time that those SEO's that have been in denial, read and reread the following:

SEO’s strategic value is quickly fading as Google’s growth slows and its prominence in distribution slides away. In its place, Facebook has become the wiring hub of the connected Web — a new “home base” alternative to Google’s dominance of the last decade.

mobile devices..especially phones and tablets..

Desktops will become pretty much limited to pro use only

Desktops vs. mobile devices

I call "insufficient options"

I remember over the past few years people saying "switch to Firefox", "switch to whatever", etc., "IE is dying and won't be around much longer."

Yet I look at my stats for my various sites and IE is still the king. Be careful of people predicting the future, IMO. Doesn't mean ignore them, it just means to be careful.

FarmBoy

Sales of desktop and floor-standing PCs are going to fall off a cliff soon, so too with laptops and netbooks. Sales of tablets are going into the stratosphere...

From what I remember, comScore is a US operation. Its figures outside of those sites that it tracks and outside of the US seem to be estimates. Part of the work I do is TLD surveys. The state of a TLD is more than its number of registered domains. In terms of development and usage, TLDs can be very different. Whereas .com has 95.77 million domains registered, it would be very lucky to have an actively developed percentage of 20%. A survey of approximately 493K .co websites showed 12.56% of the surveyed websites potentially actively developed. 49.08% were parked on PPC and 15.55% were holding pages.

While the article has a few interesting points, it is very much a hammer solution: if all you've got is a hammer then everything is a nail. And since it excludes countries other than the US, then all you've got is a particular sort of nail. However the problem for such simplistic articles is that the web is complex. The web is complex in ways that most can't even imagine. Thousands of new websites are launched each day and thousands are deleted. Others are developed and others again are left derelict. But all this activity, the lifecycle of the web, goes unnoticed except when that site you were looking for no longer exists.

Regards...jmcc

The results — at least for my own company, Wetpaint — are that social media brings more qualified eyeballs and retains them. People who come via social media stay longer on the first visit; and they are more likely to come back sooner and more frequently. Overall, our visitors from social networks have a relationship that’s several times stronger — and several times as valuable when measured in engagement, pageviews, and revenues — than the relationships people form when then arrive through search.

Who agrees/disagrees with this, based on their own experience?

I disagree with that but I'm NOT surprised in the least at the contraction and the reason is obvious imo.

BIG companies, like Google with +1 groups, are trying to be the everything of the internet. What they see as improvements (more visitors, more revenue) come at the cost of less visitors for existing sites and fewer sales by sites with less presence online.

The telling part of that article is "if you taker facebook out of the equation" and it already didn't include google sending visitors to Google properties(shopping!) or Bing to Bing properties etc.

We're losing small sites daily. Even if they are still online they are quickly buried in search rankings the moment they get popular and pop up on radar.

Eventually there will be no need for solo publishers, bigger outfits can and will cover your subject soon enough. I blame the anonymous easy access to ad revenue, you don't need to forge and maintain relationships to get paid anymore.

Sales of desktop and floor-standing PCs are going to fall off a cliff soon, so too with laptops and netbooks. Sales of tablets are going into the stratosphere...

says who? they are still less then 5%(if that). Don't mistake blabber on the TV and wireless carriers pushing them to no end with "sales going to the stratosphere".

Remember when people said netbook sales were off the charts....where are those sales now?

wireless carriers are getting ultra aggresive, and they'll advertise to no end to shove some pennies to create device that hooks you to their thousands per year contact. wireless carriers suddenly think they are bigger then google, apple, and MS.

[edited by: J_RaD at 4:37 pm (utc) on Jul 2, 2011]

We're losing small sites daily. Even if they are still online they are quickly buried in search rankings the moment they get popular and pop up on radar.

correct, goog and the big boys are putting the squeeze on the net....they bigger they get, the smaller the internet. So what do they do? squeeze harder!

its like the bully in the school yard finally has everyone by the shirt tail.....then he says crap thats not enough to cut down the trees and shoot those birds! when you are powered by greed and the bottom line of investors nothing is ever enough.

BIG companies, like Google with +1 groups, are trying to be the everything of the internet

Yeah, a little part of me thinks that 'social' is just a smokescreen to sucker people to putting their content, time, effort into someone else's web property. Third party mega sites like facebook, twitter, goog, youtube, (ecoms: amazon, ebay).

You can try to use these sites to steer eyeballs to your core site, but that also means you have less time to work on the core site, after all.

Oh well, have to go where the people are, guess it's always been that way..

You can try to use these sites to steer eyeballs to your core site, but that also means you have less time to work on the core site, after all.

Some of the attraction for webmasters and content developers is that it doesn't take a lot of time, or effort to integrate social media into a web presence.

Facebook and Twitter have already done the hard part by gathering millions of eyeballs and ear-gates in one place. All the web content developers have to do is use it to their advantage.

This, IMO, is the most powerful piece of Elowitz's article:

People who come via social media stay longer on the first visit; and they are more likely to come back sooner and more frequently. Overall, our visitors from social networks have a relationship that’s several times stronger — and several times as valuable when measured in engagement, pageviews, and revenues — than the relationships people form when then arrive through search.

Further supports the futurists predictions that websites will be obsolete in the future.

Couple this with the fact that the USA and the world economies are in the trash due to poor leadership. People can't afford to run websites, pay hosting, buy domains like they used to.

websites wont die on desktops, because there's plenty of other mediums that will come into use soon that use big screens. like TVs.

we will all be able surf the internet on our TVs soon, and that will be huge -- big, if not bigger than mobile phones. mobile-size websites will be no use for that.

After 20 Years, Is The Website About to Become Extinct?

"In a few year's time there won't be such a thing as a website," claimed Boulton. "With the rise of the social Web, now online experiences are built around the individual rather than around the organization."

So whereas websites are "destinations that you go to to find information," according to Boulton, the current era is increasingly about information coming to the individual and interacting with it on devices like smartphones.

[nytimes.com...]

we will all be able surf the internet on our TVs soon, and that will be huge -- big, if not bigger than mobile phones. mobile-size websites will be no use for that.

What is important on TV surfing is the definition ..HD sets are 1080 or 720 and no more..which is about the definition of a mobile phone or a "pad"..so sites built for screen def of around 800 or 900 or so ( mobile ) will be perfect for TV ..hence my comment much earlier in the thread..

An iphone4 has almost the same screen definition as an HD TV..as a "pad".same site will work great on all 3..make it for the iphone4 ..

Seems to me this article should be more about one business' success than anything else AND an explanation that people use the internet for entertainment. The Facebook website was a great idea and it's no wonder it's having such incredible growth. People want to interact with each other and have fun and doing so online was restricted before to fractures of websites - with forums being the best option for interaction imo. Myspace was getting there but that ship just wasn't steered by the right people to pull it off. It takes a lot of money and a brilliant strategy to get one website to appeal to so many people that are parts of so many different cultures all over the world and to be the go-to all in one for entertainment. So far, Facebook has been able to do that to a large degree. Co-marketing with Twitter, and creating buzz words like "social media" and articles like this have all been an important part of that.

The way people use the internet and the way they are marketed to on the internet are always evolving and the Facebook option for personal interaction (which I include in the Entertainment category) has been an important development . There is only so much time in a day and people only have so much time available to screw around. More and more people now know that you can go to Facebook.com and get that fix.


Just my .02


And I don't really like "studies" that take one small metric, like 1 year of U.S. internet use and make too broad of a claim. I bet a lot of that can be attributed to entertainment and the "fix" Facebook provides.

And social networks are now used by 90 percent of U.S. Internet users

How is a "social network" defined? It seems to me most people think of Facebook, Twitter, and one of the other little badges they've seen on a website as a "social network", but I wonder what this particular metric includes.

I love the first chart with the big title "Why Media Companies Must Embrace Facebook". Sounds like Senator Palpatine's relentless calls to Young Skywalker lol.

It is time that those SEO's that have been in denial, read and reread the following:

SEO’s strategic value is quickly fading as Google’s growth slows and its prominence in distribution slides away. In its place, Facebook has become the wiring hub of the connected Web — a new “home base” alternative to Google’s dominance of the last decade.

For non-commercial queries I completely agree, but does anybody search Facebook for "best android phone", or "dallas tx car insurance"? I don't think so, nor do I think they ever will.

Will search engines always be where people go for commercial queries? Who knows, but if not, social sites like Facebook will not be what replaces them. They just aren't built for it.

An iphone4 has almost the same screen definition as an HD TV

Oh nonsense. I hope you're not designing sites I ever want to view on my TV or desktop.

The iPhone 4 is 960 x 640 px, FullHD is 1920 x 1080 px.

Even with increasing resolutions of mobile devices, they're restricted by physical size. The angle of view of decent sized home based screens will always be far larger, mandating different design decisions.

The diversity of interests that people have is being completely ignored when predictions of the end of websites are made.

Professional webmasters (i.e. who do, or hope to, get paid for our efforts) can easily forget that many people have deep interest in a topic and run their site as a hobby rather than a business; and running a website isn't expensive (if your time is given freely and as long as you don't get inundated with traffic). We should also remember that any niche that does not attract much advertising spend is unlikely to be forced out of existence by corporations - even Demand Media has a point where they say no.

I absolutely agree that some, mainly popular, elements of the web/net have changed or will do soon so that small players are marginalised or eliminated but extrapolating that to predict the end of the web is just plain wrong.

Why niche will remain; an offline/online comparison.

Let's take the example of offline businesses, it's certainly true that many mega-corporations exist now (something that was not the case before) and they control certain sectors (just look at food where you have only a few huge supermarket groups dealing with only a few huge food groups and "owning" the market). Mega-corporations are to offline as Google or Facebook are to online, but there are still many medium and small businesses that are in the food business; mainly because of convenience (which we can exclude on the web as distances are not physical) or because they are specialised (the niche player on the web). The nature of supermarkets is such that they can never cater for every niche food, doing that ruins their business model; so specialists can be small and that can be a defence in some ways. There are verticals that there will be no room for specialists, but many verticals NEED specialists to cater for the diverse requirements of the marketplace. Niche players will have more loyal customers/users who value the service or information more than the technological delivery method - I've seen many tremendously useful hobbyist sites where I know that person struggles to build a site so expecting them to migrate to another platform (or many such platforms) is not going to happen. Faced with the choice of using an "old" technology such as a website to get to information that is not available elsewhere is an easy one to know the response to, people will use the website in the same way that books are still used today.

Some things are not meant for corporates!

Another example from the offline world (that resonates particularly well with the hobbyist site) is the role that charities play. Can you imagine a corporate moving into every sector that charities cater for? I certainly can't. Some things are not interesting to corporations (OK, they might support charities but that's often their CSR departments "doing good" or "giving back").

The service provided by charities is more important than them being located in a swanky office or a shiny new shop - in the same way, online, people will seek them out and will not mind if they don't have an app or if they are not on Facebook - this means that websites will remain a great source of information for people who have a specific need and who trust the source (in fact, a website will probably be mandatory for many such organisations so as not to discriminate against people seeking the service - as it's widely available and tools exist for it that cater for disabilities).

Can you extrapolate a decline in web usage to the end of the web?

Not with any level of confidence! Lets look at why the percentage of usage has changed;

People are lazy and cheap! (a person may not be but people in general are) The availability of streamed movies probably takes some users away from offline stores, but it also attracts users that simply would not have used that time for watching a movie. The greater availability of services in a simple and immediate form will create massive, and probably unpredictable, changes to the way the public spends it's time (even though many of the same options were available before, some barrier such as cost, time or opportunity cost has been removed). Whatever happens with usage in those big areas such as entertainment is significant but it does not cater for informational requirements.

Also, It's likely that aimless browsing has been lessened as options increase to allow for long interactions to occur (movie watching, game playing, social...). People will choose to spend their free time in changing ways, but there will always be actions that are not deemed to be free time exercises (such as researching work stuff or finding a contractor to fix a problem).

So what will remain a web activity and why? (and why app to web will remain)

We must remember that people can learn to go to a particular site (even if that means searching for that brand) if they do it often enough and if it gives them a reason to come back - this is a simple idea to do with brand building; so the activities that people like/need to do often are likely to promote the ability for brands to be built (and apps to be successful). But what about the type of need that is so infrequent that someone will not remember brands (let's say finding a plumber or searching for an unusual piece of information). Of course we must also remember that some people will use a service often enough for brands to be important whereas others will see the service as a one use affair (e.g. a regular hill-walker needing a new tent versus a music festival camper in need of a tent - both use an outdoor goods shop but one will know much about that vertical and the other will see it as a one-off purchase and hence forget who they bought the tent from). The lesson here is that even well established "verticals" can be treated as niche by some users.

So, given that many people will see verticals as a niche they need a way to access that information in a way that differs from say an app that they have chosen to be a permanent feature on their phone (as an example, how many people reading this have an app on their phone right now that is for something they have not needed in the last year?). The occasional need is where a service such as Google pops up as the choice most people will make; that may be through an app to do the search but it's likely that the user will end up on a website (even if they then go on to install an app for that provider for some reason).

Another reason that the web will remain for a very long time is the need for the likes of Google to offer a complete search - people will lose faith with Google if they exclude even a small percentage of the things they search for. As long as Google has a competitor, and probably even if they do not, they will feel the need to continue offering web results; they may favour other delivery methods in the future but if an app does not exist that answers the query, what other option is there?

Oh nonsense. I hope you're not designing sites I ever want to view on my TV or desktop.

The iPhone 4 is 960 x 640 px, FullHD is 1920 x 1080 px.

Had I said FullHD, and not HD, you might have had a point , but I didn't , so you don't :)

There is a generation of under 20 year olds who live around their mobile devices,phones,pads, tabs etc non of which have the definition we do on our monitors, they do not create things with these devices, they talk to each other and they consume what has been created by those of us with monitors..and who work with those monitors as opposed to use them merely to access the web from our chairs.

They are the vast majority, they are who I make websites for..you probably don't surf with all browsers at max screen..so those sites also work for you;-) the percentage of mobile device share of the web has doubled in just the last 12 months, IMO it will continue to do so and will accelerate to the point where the average person will no longer use "monitors" to access the web within the next 5 to 10 years..because they want to be able to access all of that from wherever they are..they do not want to have to be at home and sat in a chair to do so.

I will be retired by the time some people realise the error in thinking that their visitors think, consume,surf, navigate websites, purchase and communicate as they themselves do.

Webmasters are not my market, nor are they Google's, Apple's, Yahoo's, Bing's or facebook's..and all of those are focusing on "the mobile experience" to interact with their target market...because that market is huge and will get bigger faster, whereas the webmaster market is small in comparison, and will get smaller in comparison.

There is a generation of under 20 year olds who live around their mobile devices,phones,pads, tabs etc non of which have the definition we do on our monitors, they do not create things with these devices, they talk to each other and they consume what has been created by those of us with monitors...

Only certain types of site appeal to mobile users though. Its not the entire web.
With social stuff like facebook, then okay, mobile is probably the future. And other kinds of sites to, that cater to people on the go (events sites, transport, news blah blah)

But what about the other half of the web? Will people will really switch to booking their holidays on their mobile? Sure, its possible, but the vast vast majority of people will prefer to do it sitting down in front of their monitor where they can browse and research and look at decent pictures. Anyone who says these kinds of sites should focus on doing mobile apps is daft.

I think the only reason mobile phone use on the internet is seen to be growing so fast is purely because it appeals to mass-traffic sites like facebook. And people look at the numbers and think it applies to the entire wide range of sites on the web.

People dont buy big stuff on their moble phones. Sure, they dont mind chatting to their facebook friends, but they're not going to buy spend £200 at amazon, or anywhere else, while sitting on the bus.

mobile devices,phones,pads, tabs

You got hung up on "phones", the first in the list :)

They are increasing doing their buying, via the last two on the list..many people do not want a desktop and monitor in their home..they are quite content with a pad,( or laptop ) and games consoles hooked up to their TV..and games consoles can "surf"..

As I said thinking that how you use the web, is how everyone else does, ( especially your visitors ) is an error many fall into..

Btw, I didn't say anything about "doing mobile apps"..

i just dont see there's going to be much of a difference between website design for monitors, and website design for TVs and games consoles (which are on the TV). And pads are practically identical. laptops ARE identical.

Identical to what ?
Identical does have a very precise meaning and is always relative to something ..

This monitor (a) 22" def is 1600x900
The one next to (b) it 22" is 1680x1050
The one twinned ( dual screen set up ) with (b) (c) is a 22" 1680x1050.
The 3 other machines in the room are all on separate monitors at 22" 1680x1050

The 32" HD TV in the corner is a 720p
Our other TV is a full HD 1080p

Both are connected to the web and to media centres and games consoles.

Upstairs we have 3 22" monitors 1680x1050 attached to 3 machines..and 1 720p HD TV,' again connected to games consoles and web).

Not all the computors are connected to the web..those which run windows are not ;-)..

Many here ( because we work with the web ) will have similar setups to the above..but we are not our average customer or visitor..

The average person's ( webmasters do not buy average laptops ) laptop is much closer to the 720p def than it is to the above monitor definitions.
iphone4 is 960x640
ipad2 is 1024 x 768..

The latter two are much closer to the 720 HD TV def than they are to monitor def..design for them ( what the vast majority of your average people have )..and it works for the rest..except for those tiny few who surf at fullscreen on monitors..or who surf at fullscreen on full HD TVs.

You either see that designing for what you have and what you do, and how you act, instead of what your customers and visitors, have, and do, and act, is an error, or you don't.

And if you don't?.. then thats my gain ;-)

when people design sites they dont think "this one is for the desktop and this one is for a laptop, and this one is for the pad". they just design it to work well at different resolutions, like 1024 and 800x600. big screen TVs will be no different.

The only real difference that i think TVs will introduce is websites will definitely have to look good on vast screens. (because even if people have vast monitors at the moment, the windows generally dont fill up the whole screen -- but that will change with TVs). We'll have to size up the text and buttons and everything else. But that is just a CSS issue, hardly difficult.

i dont get why people think everything will be done on smaller screens. why should it? just because its small and portable? you could say the same thing about TV, but people still do that sitting in front of a big box. Watching TV is a stationary pasttime, you dont do it on the move, And so are 99% of the things that we do on the web. We sit down and do it somewhere. Given a choice, if people are spending more than five minutes on the web, then im sure that they will prefer to have a comfortable size TV/monitor screen to do it on, rather than one that is 2 inches across.

---

The data that suggests web use has dropped for non-mobile users "in terms of minutes" may be nothing more than a reflection of the increase in speed and falling prices. practically everybody has broadband now, which wasnt the case a few years ago. So of course we spend less time on the web -- its ten times quicker.

we will all be able surf the internet on our TVs soon, and that will be huge

huh? where have you been since media center 2005? i've been doing that for 6 years now, nothing ground breaking to report.

Most people aren't viewing the web on their TVs at the moment. But I think it's going that way.

I've often wondered why YouTube push you to upload FD (1920 x 1080) videos which use up huge amounts of space compared to standard videos. This thread leads me to the conclusion that they are trying to future proof themselves against the day when it does become common to surf via the television.

Social media advances while the elderly webmasters still believing its 2001 fail to see the changes.

visualizing the decline of the destination web, the rise of the social web

As an exercise, pick any of the top 100 brands from the Millward Brown or Interbrand list. Then go to Google Website Trends and enter that brand’s URL (i.e. bmw.com), selecting “websites” above the resulting graph to get unique visitors.

For each brand you should find that visitors between 2007 and 2009 are trending down, or flat at best.

Where are People Going? Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.

[geoffnorthcott.com...]

If anyone remembers back to the days when Mosaic pushed Lynx out of the way, the entry level resolution for "graphical browsing" was 640x480.

For years it remained the same, until 800x600 started to get pushed by Apple, and higher resolutions by PC user went to 1024x768.

Those who redesigned too early for the higher resolutions had to deal with visitor complaints that the information was "chopped off" or the user had to scroll left or right.

I stuck with designing for the lowest common denominator (640x480) for a very long time, and watched as the first PDA's supported HTML.

I've pretty much always stayed 2 cycles behind the bleeding edge -- using a self-centering layout where I knew +90% of users would have no problem viewing my content.

While "cell phones", "smart phones" and mobile apps are "the rage" (today), the truth is you can't read very well on one of them, you certainly can't print anything most of the time, and the data storage capabilities are minimal.

Walk in any office, school, library, government office and you'll find desktops computers -- they aren't going anywhere.

Sure there are plenty of business that have gone mobile, but the one thing they are all looking for a bigger mobile devices, not smaller.

So, we have the birth of the "tablet". It's really nothing different than a laptop, except the screen and guts are all one piece, and the keyboard and "mouse" have been replaced by touch software.

Sales of tablets will continue to rise and "laptops" will fade, (forget netbooks -- they were an intermediary step to sell cellular service and cloud storage and were just pared down "laptops").

I have a very interesting research group to study and base my predictions on -- I'm the parent of a 15 year old.

15 year olds use their cell phones to text, phone, trade photos, etc.. but once they are in the house or at school they go to the desktop, laptop or other large scale device to research homework, type up a paper, browse their Facebook wall, manipulate photos and videos they've captured from their cell phone or digital cameras, use video chat sites like "oovoo" -- they all HAVE TO do their homework on the larger scale devices.

If you want to predict the future of computing -- do a study of 12-18 year old's computing habits.

FWIW -- I haven't heard one of them say "I want a netbook" since the cell providers and the big box retail electronics stores pushed them 2 Christmases ago.

Look for larger tablets this coming "retail electronic holiday season" --- the ones you could do something like "browse websites" on.

The web isn't contracting, it's fragmented between semi-useful mobile "apps" coupled with reduced numbers of people establishing (very) small business websites, small organization websites, and individual's websites since they can just throw up a Facebook page, get a twitter account to promote, upload some YouTube videos to link to and skip the domain names, hosting and other costs and obstacles associated with have "a website"). Any decent size organization will have a website, and Facebook, Twitter, and the rest are websites.

The web will live long and prosper.

[This message was typed on my laptop, which I use a "desktop" with a full size keyboard, a mouse and a decent size monitor plugged into it -- and I can unplug and pick up the laptop and take it with me and have all my software and data "on the road"]