The Conservative Internet: June 11, 2001 issue of New Thinking

June 11, 2001 New Thinking:
The conservative Internet

Website content management

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June 11, 2001

The conservative Internet

By Gerry McGovern

The fact that just four organizations control 50 percent of the Internet reflects a conservative Internet. This is not what the Internet was supposed to be. Rather, we were told that the Internet was a liberating force where the small player was on a level playing pitch with the big player. This level playing pitch has allowed the big players to stamp all over the smaller ones.

Jupiter Media Metrix recently reported that people spend 60 percent of their time online using the products and services of 14 companies (50 percent of time is spent with just four). Two years ago, it was 110 companies that shared that 60 percent of time.

The Web is a publishing medium and publishing is a most difficult industry. Steve Case, chairman of AOL Time Warner, has talked about how the Web makes every enterprise a publisher. That’s true. The question is: What type of publisher?

The Web delivers cheap publishing tools, but that doesn’t count for much. There may be 10, 20, 30 million websites out there. There might as well be 100 million because it doesn’t have any impact on the fact that 50 percent of time is spent with four organizations (AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Napster).

In fact, the more websites there are, the more consolidation there will be. That’s because more choice makes people more conservative not less. Think of it this way: if I am given 10 options, I may choose 3; if I’m given 100 options, I may still only choose 3, maybe even fewer. People don’t want infinite choice. They want limited choice. That’s what AOL and Yahoo give them.

Publications are notoriously difficult to launch and make successful. That’s because people are very conservative in the way they consume content. They may experiment a bit in their youth, but then they choose one newspaper and a couple of magazines and stick with them. Getting them to budge is an extremely difficult affair.

Many of us thought that if we put lots of content on our websites we would grab the reader. Then we would make money off them through advertising. The ad market collapse has illustrated a deeper flaw in this approach. Quality content costs more to produce than any ad revenue is likely to compensate for. And quality content is not enough. It requires huge marketing budgets to turn a conservative reader into a loyal subscriber.

People still want content. But for the vast majority of their content needs they’re going to depend on tried and trusted brands such as AOL and Yahoo. Websites should avoid producing general content that apes what traditional, established publishers provide. Rather, they should focus on making sure that the content which is unique to their website is of a high standard.

They should focus on content that will help sell something. This is humdrum information such as product details, pricing, distribution, special offers, etc. Other content that wraps around this core content and makes the website ‘sticky’ is all well and good. However, it may prove to be more expensive than it’s worth.

The conservative Internet consumer trusts very few websites to deliver them their content. They are skeptical and mistrustful of much of the rest of the Web, where they find content that may be free, but costs them money by wasting their time because of its inferior quality. When that conservative consumer comes to your website, it’s better to have 20 pages of high quality content to offer them than 100 pages of average quality.

Gerry McGovern

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People don’t want infinite choice. They want limited choice.