The web is dead! Long live the web!
Marius Cloete, head of research at the PPA, on Ben Elowitz’s comment that the web is shrinking. If this is correct where does it leave traditional media like magazines? Potentially in a good place…
In the last few weeks there have been two stories that brilliantly illustrated just how easily and unexpectedly the media landscape can change.
The first will require no further explanation or elaboration. It’s of course the phone-hacking scandal at News of the World which, after dragging on for some time, suddenly moved from being a needle to a spark in the haystack for News International.
The other, much less publicised piece was by Ben Elowitz stating that the World Wide Web is shrinking and with it the very foundation on which the Google search empire is built! Perhaps the end of that sentence deserves a few more exclamation marks or better yet a question mark for this seems a preposterous claim to make in the face of so many headlines hailing amazing growth in areas like online video, mobile internet and social networks.
Well according Elowitz it’s actually the latter three that’s threatening the existence of the former. If you can suspend disbelief and look past Google’s stellar financial performance announced just last Friday, he makes some interesting points.
Like if you strip out mobile access, video and social networks, web consumption in the US in terms of minutes of use has declined by 9% between March 2010 and March 2011.
Facebook consumption during the same period grew by 69% and Elowitz claims that Facebook is not growing in addition to the web it’s actually taking consumption away from the rest of the web.
Facebook, he argues, has become part of what he terms the “social web”. He describes this as a “generational overhaul in how we use the internet” in which searching for information on the web is being replaced by a digital life which delivers information to you instead. Driven increasingly by apps the social web knows who we are, what we like, who we’re connected to and is with us wherever we go.
So are we witnessing the birth of a new medium, which is internet enabled but doesn’t necessarily rely on the internet to provide its interface? If so it would go a long way towards explaining Google’s aggressive diversification into areas like mobile operating systems, its foray into display and video advertising on YouTube and its tenacious second attempt at creating a social network to rival Facebook with Google+.
If these observations are indeed correct where would it leave traditional media like magazines?
The answer may be in a potentially good place. Web 2.0 and earlier versions have served newspapers well in capitalising on the immediacy of the web in delivering breaking news and they have subsequently built up enough eyeballs to generate attractive levels of advertising revenue. This business model has never been particularly well suited to the smaller audiences enjoyed by magazine websites though.
In order to start realising their full digital potential magazines had to wait for the tablet and the app to provide the rich and interactive environment needed to transfer the medium’s visually appealing format from print. Magazines have been quick to move on this new development as we’ve seen with some of the stunning magazine content apps to hit the market in the past year.
But the concept of a more socially driven web offers the opportunity for magazines to unleash their true potential in the digital realm; their ability to craft content which unites and serves communities of common interest. If magazine publishers show the same vigour in moving towards ingraining their brands into the fabric of the social web as they have into app development, they may just find themselves riding the crest of a new digital wave.