The Internet Devouring Its Own

Posted by on Jun 28, 2010 in Media Industry, Social Media | 2 comments

The Internet is now eating its own.

News portals like AOL, Yahoo! and MSN, which helped devastate newspapers, magazines and local TV over the past decade, are themselves being damaged by social networks, notably Facebook.

Facebook, the latest Web sensation, is becoming the preferred news source of tens of millions of Internet users. Facebookers can keep up with just about anything without ever leaving the site. Their friends provide a neverending news feed, posting endless links and news items.

And just as the news portals grew fat by cannibalizing content from the legacy media, Facebook links are as likely as not to come from the portals (which probably swiped them from a newspaper).

But it’s the intensity of Facebook use that really sets it apart. The average Facebook user views about 27 pages on each visit, according to the Web-tracking service Compete.com. That’s several multiples better than the major news portals. Yahoo! users typically view about eight pages per visit, while AOL users view about seven pages and MSN users about five.

Time spent on Facebook continues to grow at the expense of news portals (and other websites). The three top news portals saw their average time per visit drop by about 22 percent over the last year. Meanwhile, time spent on the average Facebook visit was up almost 50 percent, to nearly 23 minutes.

Journalist Dylan Stableford suggests that the way out of the portal dilemma is with original content, a path several of the portals are aggressively pursuing. Create worthwhile original content, the idea goes, and users will wind up spending more time on your portal.

That’s an idea well worth pursuing, I think – content is king on the Web, and eyeballs will go where content can be found.

But I think the content-creation strategy is better suited to tightly defined niches, a subject I’ve written about for MinnPost in the past.  If portals try to be everything to everybody, they risk the same fate as that other great generalist, the newspaper.

And I have no doubt that two years from now, I’ll be writing an item about the new service that’s bleeding Facebook dry.

Related posts:

  1. Twitter = Elite, Facebook = Mass
  2. Passing Google
  3. Coming Soon to Your Facebook Page: Ambiguous Advertising
  4. More Pain Coming For Newspapers And Local TV
  5. Social Networks, Blogs Trump News Sites Online
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  • http://astronautstudio.com Andrew

    Better give Goya the photo credits on this post or he’ll be pissed. Just kidding.

    I agree that it doesn’t pay to try and be everything to everybody. Sometimes people spend all of their time focusing on the channel: what’s our site look like, where will they click, how long can we get them to stay, what’s our call to action? In reality, people are less concerned with the channel and more concerned with the message. I don’t care where I get my information as long as I get it. So it stands to reason that we’d be better off worrying about quality content than a quality channel. After all, you’re lucky if your reader even breaks away from an RSS feed to see your site.

    It’s a tough pill to swallow as a designer. I’d really like to continue making a living designing pretty “channels”. Though I don’t think it will go away, I acknowledge that it isn’t necessarily paramount.

  • Forest

    But you can fool the Internet by giving it a rock instead, hiding the child, and then overthrowing Mark Zuckerberg in a thunderous coup of Olympus.

    What was the question?

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