Just like everything in this world, the web started from zero. It was nothing, a non-existent piece of technology.
But sooner than later, the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee evolved and became a technology so expansive and it is ever-changing. The web has become so huge that it is impossible to credit the invention of the modern internet to a single person.
While the web didn't grown to become something Berners-Lee wanted, simply because it stifles competition and promotes monopolies and the dominance of a few players, the web has become a source of innovation, ideas, and also inspiration.
The web has become the place where businesses thrive, influencers make their living, and people communicate.
The web has become the very technology that opened up the playing field.
While the web is indeed expanding, a research suggests that the web is also shrinking.
The web grows as more users come online for the first time, and businesses continue create more services, which in turn increase activities.
In 2020, the number of websites registered on the “.com” domain surpassed 150,000,000.
From the day that the first login crashed, the web has indeed grown tremendously big.
However, a research found that after decades since its first commercial use, the growth of the online world is actually slowing down in some key categories.
The research which has been published in Public Library of Science, is the first to reveal some long-term trends in how businesses compete in the age of the web.
"We conducted a multi-year research project analyzing global trends in online diversity and dominance. Our research, published today in Public Library of Science, is the first to reveal some long-term trends in how businesses compete in the age of the web," said Paul X. McCarthy, an adjunct Professor at UNSW, and Marian-Andrei Rizoiu, a lecturer in Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney.
"We saw a dramatic consolidation of attention towards a shrinking (but increasingly dominant) group of online organisations. So, while there is still growth in the functions, features and applications offered on the web, the number of entities providing these functions is shrinking."
First published on The Conversation, the researchers come to this conclusion after analyzing more than six billion user comments from the social media website Reddit dating back to 2006, as well as 11.8 billion Twitter posts from as far back as 2011.
"In total, our research used a massive 5.6Tb trove of data from more than a decade of global activity."
Through the Reddit posts, the researchers analyzed all of its links that redirect to other websites and online services.
Accounting to more than one billion links, the researchers followed the path to understand the dynamics of link growth, dominance and diversity through the decade.
"We used a measure of link 'uniqueness'. On this scale, 1 represents maximum diversity (all links have their own domain) and 0 is minimum diversity (all links are on one domain, such as 'youtube.com')."
"A decade ago, there was a much greater variety of domains within links posted by users of Reddit, with more than 20 different domains for every 100 random links users posted. Now there are only about five different domains for every 100 links posted."
The researchers concluded that the pool of top-performing sources online is actually shrinking.
"In fact, between 60—70% of all attention on key social media platforms is focused towards just ten popular domains."
Using the same method, and after looking at almost 20 billion links during the course of three years, the researchers also concluded that the “rich are getting richer” online.
"The authority, influence and visibility of the top 1,000 global websites (as measured by network centrality or PageRank) is growing every month, at the expense of all other sites."
"Our findings resolve a long-running paradox about the nature of the web: does it help grow businesses, jobs and investment? Or does it make it harder to get ahead by letting anyone and everyone join the game? The answer, it turns out, is it does both."
"While the diversity of sources is in decline, there is a countervailing force of continually increasing functionality with new services, products and applications — such as music streaming services (Spotify), file sharing programs (Dropbox) and messaging platforms (Messenger, Whatsapp and Snapchat)."
In other words, the web has grown so big and significant, that online competitions are becoming clearer.
The loss of diversity is concerning, as the top performing platforms are only a handful. But this is what suggests that network effects of the web don't really apply to online businesses.
Online businesses "have permeated the entire economy and are rewriting many previously accepted rules of economics."
The researchers suggest the way to encourage diversity, is to have even more global online businesses focused on providing diverse services, by addressing consumers’ increasingly niche needs.