The Web Masters
Five who are changing the face of the Internet. — Think of 2008 as the year the Internet got greedy. As the recession goes digital, it's no longer enough to have an easy-to-use social-networking site, or blog software that corners the market on 13-year-olds.
Context & Ripple Effects
This Newsweek feature lands at a hinge moment for consumer web companies. Just days earlier, coverage asked whether the recession would kill Web 2.0, and the Guardian had already declared that Facebook was 'so last year' among hit websites, signaling fatigue with easy-to-use social networks and teen-oriented blog software. The piece answers both anxieties with a different lens: rather than asking which sites survive, it profiles five individuals said to be changing the face of the Internet.
First-order effects
- Attention shifts from products to people: five named individuals become the face of the next phase of the consumer web, while founders of merely easy-to-use social networks and youth-oriented blog tools face a raised competitive bar as ad money tightens.
- For the profiled figures themselves, the piece functions as status consolidation during a downturn — visibility that can translate into hiring power, partnerships, and investor confidence precisely when capital is scarcest.
Second-order effects
- Competitors and investors recalibrate: if the winning formula is no longer 'simple social network' or 'blog software teens adopt,' adjacent players must differentiate on utility or business model rather than ease of use, echoing questions raised since the ten issues facing Web 2.0 going into 2006.
- Media framing follows the money: person-centric coverage like this extends the cult-of-founder narrative already visible in Rolling Stone's profile of Silicon Valley's baby billionaires, concentrating attention and implicitly capital on a small set of names.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, downturns act as filters that consolidate influence around a handful of individuals and platforms — a dynamic consistent with later reporting that the web itself was shrinking into fewer dominant destinations.
- Over the longer arc, the gap between the early-2000s vision of a democratized internet and the concentrated reality it produced becomes a recurring subject, as reflected in retrospective coverage of how the internet deviated from its mass-empowerment promise.
The trend: Economic stress pushes the consumer web from an era of abundant, lookalike startups toward concentration of users, capital, and narrative around a few defining figures and platforms.