I’ve always been a big admirer of Jakob Nielsen’s writings on the subject of UX Design (e.g. Banner Blindness and the use of Eye Tracking in UI design). (see FLINK and they’re gone!) Earlier today I stumbled across this 1997 study he conducted of the Sun Newspaper’s online traffic from July 1996.
Here I discovered in the post Do Website have increasing returns? (published in April 1997) the long tail of web economics documented some 6 year’s before Clay Shirky’s paper on “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”, and almost a decade before Chris Anderson published his widely acclaimed book on “The Long Tail” “.
Jakob updated his findings in 2006 in this subsequent post (See Traffic Logs) only to discover that the major exception to the “rule of thumb” he had discovered in 1997 was that 10 years on Google proved to be an outlier to the Zipf curve.
The key insight that he provided from these extended studies being simply that “The long tail’s end pays for aggregators who get their products from others, but companies who must develop their own are usually better served by staying away from the full tail.”
He then took his research a step further and applied the same methodology to the Social Networks (See the 90:9:1 Rule for Participation).
Needless to say I wish I’d stumbled across this material sooner. Particularly in light of the recent study of Metcalfe’s Law (see The roadmap from Metcalfe Law to Chaos Theory) and the much earlier posts on How yesterday’s news became just tables in a database and the search of a web beyond the endless lists of likes
What would be even more interesting to discover is how the strategic thinkers inside the Newspaper and Magazine industries responded to these studies back in 1997. The reason I say that is because this study clearly suggested, that contrary to industry expectations at that time, the hyper linked economy was a fundamentally inefficient form of media. At least compared to traditional broadcast media. Without the link backs provided by 99% of redundant messages (i.e. web pages) traffic wouldn’t flow around the web towards the 1% of viable (i.e. high traffic) sites. Indeed this inefficiency wasn’t just at the macro level but also at the micro level. Even the well-known newspaper brands had to generate large volumes of redundant messages to not only attract traffic to their website but to facilitate traffic flow around the site.
Here then, published as early as 1997, was the evidence to suggest that redundancy wasn’t just built into the system. When it came to online media redundancy was the system.
January 14th, 2012 → 5:35 am
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