You’re totally right. I’m doing my dissertation on the fragmentation of online news brands and the tail is definitely getting longer – loads of data back this up.

Now, a distinction should be made between content and service websites. There’s no reason why more than a few brands should coexist on the market for services.

There aren’t an indefinite number of ways you can differentiate a social network. MySpace is for pre-teens, Facebook for students, Skyblogs for the French and Orkut for Brazilians.

Now, when it comes to content, there are as many ways you can be unique as there are users. No two people have the same view on things – that’s why I’m arguing that we’re heading for a world of one-person brands.

On the content-side, that is.

I assume that for ‘big’ things, people have default websites. As an example:
news: bbc
social network: myspace
music: last.fm

These websites will be often visited, and their address will be entered by hand. The concept (news) and target (bbc) will be explicitly related in a cognitive model: thinking of news will generate the address.

For ’small’ things, the place to go is less or not clear. There, people have to rely on search engines (for specific things they want to know) or websites that link to a page (for things that suddenly seem interesting). These pages will be less often visited, and together make up the long tail.

Cutting off the beginning of the tail (bbc, myspace & last.fm, in this example), the situation should (dramatically) change concerning origin of visitor (direct or via a referrer). Hence, I would love to see this data with more parameters to play with, such as ‘topic of the website’ and ’size of the website’. Otherwise, small websites incorrectly start believing that the most important source of traffic is people who enter the url directly, which is only true for very big websites.

What are the thoughts of others on this?

I’ve corrected my mistake, hope this new wording is more in line with what you had in mind!

Regarding web usages, some figures also indicate that more websites are visited. If we take facebook and myspace out of the picture, I think we’ll see a tail getting much longer, but not fatter, than offline.

For commoditized products that are in huge demand, there’s no reason to have several suppliers (eg. bbc.co.uk is by very, very far, UK’s #1 online news brand, even for people who prefer reading Guardian or Times offline). In the other hand, the web still excels at providing niche content.

From what I’ve research and what I see, I think there’s just no room on the web for mid-sized players. It’d be interesting how news outlets that are not competing for the top spot will manage to split up in a network no less valuable than the sum of their parts.

With the advent of the feed reader, and considering most of my online time is spent reading blogs, I find that the only times I really click a refer link is on those sparing occasions where I scan the headlines at Google News or, more commonly, when a blogger specifically links a Link Of Interest that actually interests me.

For example, I was referred here by Dr. Scott McLeod’s blog, on his “recent comments” widget. As someone with a journalism degree and a fetish for the online, the Online Journalism Blog caught my Interest. Worth noting: the vast majority of links don’t.

Anecdotally, I know that I’m much more likely to click on a link at the end of a posted comment, rather than a link embedded in the text of a comment or that embedded in the name of the commenter.

It’s a great way to advertise one’s Web site, at the very least.

http://awaitingtenure.wordpress.com/

I’m glad you found the Indiana research as interesting as I did.

But I think you may have misinterpreted one aspect of my post.

I am definitely not arguing for “building destinations, not bridges.” In fact, I still believe that “build a network, not a destination” is the right strategy for online media.

I do think it’s interesting, though, that so much online usage seems to be driven by people visiting the same sites over and over, typing in URL’s or clicking on bookmarks.

As you probably know, research (for instance, by Matthew Hindman of Arizona State) has shown that online media usage is even more concentrated than usage of traditional media — which is counter-intuitive considering that there is so much more choice online.

Research by network theorists has suggested this concentration of online traffic is due to the link-based network structure of the Web, and I still believe that’s a big part of the explanation. But so is the fact that people go back to the same sites over and over again — presumably the ones they find most interesting, relevant and useful. Web publishers need to figure out how to build this kind of repeat usage.

Keep up the good work …