It’s amazing to me how entrenched in this era of the web we can become that we forget that Web 1.0 sites still dominates. Google, MSN, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and MySpace own a large percentage of the top 10 traffic across the web. Many of them have started to show some Web 2.0 features (people weren’t too pleased to see MySpace on a Web 2.0 list), but they are still Web 1.0 at the heart of things. Today, I wrote about the dominance of Photobucket over Flickr yet nobody seems to notice. However, I bet the owners of Photobucket, who report to be very profitable have no problem with Flickr getting all of the attention. Of course if you believe in Alexa, Flickr is sitting pretty when compared to Photobucket.
This just goes to show that geeks have forgotten that there is a bigger web out there that involves “real people”. We have forgotten that we are the minority on the web and the real successes come from sites that know how to leverage the traffic of the general public. Yeah, Web 2.0 sites generally have a greater social interaction and cleaner interfaces, but what’s the point if they aren’t getting the traffic?
What type of community do you want to belong to, a small one or a large one? Apparently most people want large communities where they can create their own little niche groups within them (Facebook does a wonderful job of leveraging groups). Are Web 1.0 creators simply better marketers or is there really no reason for the users of these sites to go anywhere else?
The best sites will find what makes Web 1.0 great and leverage that with Web 2.0 technologies and advances. Hopefully we can move beyond what the people who write blogs think is cool and go back to what the people who actually use the sites find useful. From a business and marketing standpoint don’t forget the majority of the web when looking to make it big.
Originally posted on September 27, 2006 @ 10:45 pm