FC: Jakob Nielsen on "media consolidation": Nobody rules the Web!

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://useit.com/alertbox/20030616.html

Specialization Means Nobody Rules the Web
Because of the debate about ever-more centralized mass media and changing 
FCC regulations in the United States, the question of whether the Web is 
also becoming centralized has become a hot potato. However, the Web is not 
a mass medium. It's not broadcast. The Web is on-demand, driven by each 
customer's specialized need in each moment.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece titled "More News, Less Diversity" 
Matthew Hindman and Kenneth Neil Cukier argued that the FCC is wrong to 
view the Web as a diverse information environment, since most traffic 
accrues to the biggest sites.

Hindman and Cukier mention that two-thirds of all hyperlinks point to the 
ten most popular sites of the 13,000 that cover gun control, and that the 
top ten sites on capital punishment receive 63% of the topic's links. 
Nonetheless, considering the Web as a whole, diversity is still ensured.

The question here is not whether some topical sites are bigger than others. 
They obviously are, given the power law for the Web and its subsets. The 
question is whether the same few sites would always dominate, regardless of 
a user's goal. As a sidebar looking more closely at Hindman and Cukier's 
examples demonstrates, that is clearly not the case:
There is zero overlap between the top sites for the two topics they mention.
Looking at more specialized sub-issues or slightly rephrasing the questions 
leads users to yet other sites.
In a different domain, the main sites for economic issues are almost 
completely different from the main sites for crime-related issues.
In total, searches on seven different topics identified 59 different sites 
among the 70 entries on the search listing's first page: only 16% of cases 
were multiple listings of the same site. Not exactly indicative of a few 
sources monopolizing Internet debate.

All of these searches were performed on Google, which is currently the 
largest search engine. Still, there are many other search engines with big 
market shares.

On Microsoft's MSN search engine, only two of the top ten gun control hits 
were included on Google's list. And none of the nine sites in MSN's top ten 
capital punishment sites were included in Google's list (Amnesty 
International appeared twice on MSN, but not on Google). More proof that 
sites might be big in some contexts, but are rarely big everywhere.




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