The Web Is Shrinking. Now What?
We all read the statistics every week documenting the meteoric new growth areas of the Internet, and they are impressive: — Online video is exploding, with annual user growth of more than 45 percent. Mobile-device time spent increased 28 percent last year …
Context & Ripple Effects
The growth numbers in this piece extend a curve that was already visible two years earlier, when video watching jumped 40% in a single year — consumption was migrating to rich media well before 2011. What the AllThingsD column adds is the other side of that ledger: the same measurements showing online video users up more than 45% annually and mobile device time up 28% also show aggregate time on the conventional page-based web contracting.
That combination matters because attention, not page inventory, is what advertising markets price. If video and mobile are absorbing an outsized share of incremental user time, the economics built around the desktop browser start eroding even while total internet activity keeps climbing.
First-order effects
- Display advertisers and the publishers dependent on standard web pages face shrinking share of user attention, pushing budgets toward video placements and mobile inventory right now.
Second-order effects
- Content producers respond by reformatting for the growing channels — video-first output and app distribution — which diverts effort and monetization away from the open web page as the default unit of publishing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's center of gravity shifts from pageview-driven portals to platforms that own the video and mobile pipes, changing who aggregates audiences and who sets ad pricing.
The trend: Internet attention is consolidating into video and mobile channels faster than the page-based web can hold it, making screen-level time spent — not pageviews — the metric that decides where money flows.