The Long Tail Internet Myth: Top 10 domains aren’t shrinking
Written by TJ Mahony (contact - e-mail) -- December 19th, 2006 | Share - Save - E-mailToday’s post is an extended analysis and perspective on Richard MacManus’s original post.
I’m a huge advocate of the Long Tail theory/reality and I even require new members of the Compete.com team to read Chris Andersen’s book by the same title. The basic premise of the long tail is that the internet has unlocked affordable and available content and product distribution channels that allow ‘non hit’ media (ie. non-mainstream) to find its way into our living rooms.
| Examples of the Long Tail (Source: The Long Tail, Chris Anderson) | ||
| Books | Amazon | 40x in-stock titles compared to a Borders Superstore |
| DVDs | Netflix | 18x DVDs available compared to the average Blockbuster |
| Music | iTunes | 3.5 million tracks compared to 4,500 CDs at Walmart |
The internet enabled the Long Tail, but the internet is also a Long Tail within itself. Based on web sites visited by Compete’s community of users the internet has grown by 77% in the last five years to over 5 million unique domains. (Note: This count includes misspelled and unhosted domains people accidentally find themselves at).
Many believe that the expanding internet universe invariably reduces the relative significance and presence of the large internet properties (Yahoo, Google, etc). Fred Wilson, an active VC and well respected internet pundit, recently offered the following theory:
“I don’t have the data to prove it, but my guess is if you looked at the percent of all pageviews that are generated each month, a much smaller portion exist on the top 10 properties today than in 2000, at the height of the first Internet era.”
We found Fred’s theory interesting, we didn’t have the answer on hand, but we did have the data. Compete’s readily available data goes back to 2001, so we had to bump up Fred’s specification by a year, but the results are interesting.
Contrary to Fred’s theory and the larger theory of the Long Tail, the top internet properties are accounting for a larger percentage of total pageviews across the web. Currently, the Top 10 domains* account for 40% of the total pageviews on the internet – a 29% increase over the last five years.
*Note: Top 10 domains were based on pageviews for this analysis. Last week’s Top 20 analysis was based on Unique Visitors.
The driver of this Top Domain growth can be summed up in two words “social networks”. If you were to remove MySpace and Facebook from consideration in 2006 (also removing their pageviews from the total) top domains would only account for 33% of total pageviews – basically on par with 2001.
The internet has grown rapidly and its tail keeps getting longer, but the social web naturally promotes a top heavy head. Ebay works because sellers know they will find a healthy volume of buyers. MySpace works because I know there is a good chance I’ll find my 5th grade girlfriend. The network is the viral growth, but it’s also the interaction agent (on steroids)…
The picture below is taken from Compete SnapShot and compares the pageviews per visit at MySpace vs. Yahoo vs. Google.
60M+ visitors! 67 pageviews per visit! Nearly 30 minutes per stay! Ok, no more ‘!”’s, but you get the point. This level of interaction has simply never existed before.
Conclusions:
- The domains visited in the last five years have expanded by 77% (5.1M and growing) – the Long Tail is very real
- Interaction across traditional top web properties – when compared to the internet universe – is relatively the same today as it was five years ago
- Social networks, such as MySpace, yield a level of interaction we have never seen before. As a result, the Top 10 web properties, as measured by pageviews, account for a greater percentage of the total internet compared to five years ago
Get SnapShots of sites mentioned in this post:
- yahoo.com
- msn.com
- ebay.com
- passport.com
- neopets.com
- google.com
- excite.com
- aol.com
- go.com
- myspace.com
- facebook.com
- craigslist.com
- live.com
Did you like that post? You'll love these.
- Top-20 Domains ranked by Attention Share: Yahoo gained, Most e-commerce sites lost
- The Torso of the Internet – 1,718 sites are attracting over 1 million visitors
- Aaron Wall: How Long is Your Keyword Tail?
- Microsoft values Yahoo Visitors at $1,200 Each
- Facebook now ranked 3rd in Page Views; MySpace down nearly 20%
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December 19th, 2006 at 10:47 am
Intreresting stuff TJ. One thing that is sort of interesting that I just noticed is that all of the top 10 sites are a means to get at the long tail.
-Search engines let us filter across the entire “supply” line to find the most relevant information (arguably) regardless of size
-ebay is the epitome of a long tail retailer, as craiglist is with classifieds
-Pogo appears to represent a long tail of games
-Even social networks represent a long tail within the site: the long tail of people.
This seems to say that the aggregators at the head have gotten bigger as a result of expansion at the tail.
December 19th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
Interesting analysis, but why not run the same comparison with unique visitors as the metric, rather than pageviews? Pageviews are easily manipulated by systematic poor design in order to generate more ad revenue. Check out this post from April highlighting MySpace’s design ‘flaws’:
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/04/myspace-click-factory
Also, it would be interesting to see how your sample size has changed over the last 5 years…
December 19th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
Excellent information. I’m really curious as to whether or not the distribution of the Internet’s long tail has changed substantially since 2001. Once we get past the top sites, do we see a relatively uniform distribution of the tail? Exponential? Or can we “zoom in” on any portion of the long tail and see 10-20 relative hits trailed by yet another long tail.
Cheers.
December 19th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Jarid:
Agreed. I think we need to look at this through alternative metrics. The reason our first analysis is based on PVs was tied to the orginal theory Fred proposed. We plan to expand this analysis over time so stay tuned.
In terms of our panel, we have always managed our size to 2M active panelists. There are various seasonal fluctations, however our analysis compares Nov to Nov, so discrepancies should be minimial.
Thanks,
TJ
December 19th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
I fully agree with Max. An important aspect of the long tail theory is the element of searchability/findability. It’s the ability to find more obscure items just as easily as massively popular ones that facilitates a long-tail economy. The fact that the top sites have such massive traffic is by no means contrary to “the larger theory of the Long Tail.” Indeed, it’s perfectly in line with it, since these sites all help make the sites/pages of less popular/powerful producers viable. MySpace is a great example. It gives us nobodies (well, that is if I had a MySpace page) a platform just as easy to find as those of the big boys (if you’re looking for them, in any case).
December 20th, 2006 at 7:25 am
TECHNICALLY , this is about DOMAINS – but, Live and MSN really should be counted as one domain – if only to allow #11 to sneak into the picture.
Would anyone care to guess what #11 is???
December 20th, 2006 at 9:52 am
Great post! I always enjoy your interesting articles. It seems social networks have enabled people to substitute personally developed websites with customizable myspace pages and personal profiles on other sites. I also think that pageviews provides a somewhat biased view considering the average visitor to a social networking site views many more pages than, for instance, a blog.
December 27th, 2006 at 4:51 am
Interesting analysis.
I just did a quick calculation and the average time spent per page at 67 pages per 30 minute session is about 27 seconds, not sure what that says about the content or the design of the site as someone noted earlier.
February 24th, 2007 at 9:10 am
You’ve made the percentage mistake.
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/01/the_beginners_g.html
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/07/factchecking_my.html
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