What does Australian web history tell us? The only constant is rapid change
// August 10th, 2009 // Featured, Industry
With age, comes wisdom. At least, that’s the theory. So far, all I’ve acquired is a tendency to ramble in introductory paragraphs, reading glasses, and arthritis in my left thumb. Actually, that’s not strictly true; I think I’ve also acquired a broader perspective.
For instance, I’m excited that the Australian Interactive Media Association (AIMIA), Nielsen Online, Interaction Consortium and Paul McCarthy have developed this interactive history of the internet in Australia. At the same time, my broader perspective means I draw some different conclusions from the data.
Let’s leave aside for a moment the problem that the time scale starts in 2001, when consumer web activity probably began in earnest about six years prior, meaning this experiment only charts about half Australia’s actual web history. Telstra established a consumer ISP/portal called On Australia circa 1995 and Sean Howard’s OzeMail (which had been providing email services since the early 1980s) started offering web hosting in late 1994 or early 1995, if memory serves me. This is probably because the research industry tracking the internet has itself grown up in the same decade, from no tracking at all in the early days, to laughably inaccurate tracking in the late ’90s, to the arguably-better-than-traditional-media-research-but-still-full-of-holes research we see today.
It’s true, as AIMIA says, there are some obvious findings:
Over the period, internet penetration increased 60% (from 7.2M to 11.7M Australians) while usage doubled (from 9.25hrs per month to 21 hours per month.) I think we’d all recognise that we spend way more time online than we did in 2001 — internet banking was in its infancy, there was no YouTube, no MySpace or Facebook and no widespread ADSL network to pipe it to us quickly back then. What’s much more interesting to an old man like me is the acceleration in usage in the past 2-3 years — the history project doesn’t allow for much accuracy but to my naked, rheumy old eyes it looks like growth in time online has been accelerating rapidly these past few years.
The study shows the largely unrecognised force which is Bebo.com in Australia. Like most things out of Europe without a crazy Silicon Valley valuation and not owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media have largely missed Bebo’s growth. In Australia it has real brand advertisers, a younger audience than Facebook, and I’ve always wondered why nobody in the industry paid it enough attention. I think it’s because there’s no gritty, gruff local CEO to take calls from journalists. No local office at all, in fact. Maybe now it’ll break through? According to Nielsen’s numbers Bebo has enjoyed an average compound growth of 90% since 1995.
But what really stands out for me is the short time any one brand or even any single sector has enjoyed a dominant position in the Australian market. Five years maximum, more typically, two to three years. That’s not a lot of time to return value to shareholders and get the hell out of Dodge.
Everyone running a successful web business seems to fall into the same trap: when they achieve market dominance, their priorities change from “how do I achieve dominance?” to “how do I defend my market dominance?” It will doom you to failure in the four years at most you have left. Approaching the challenge from the direction of defence always means you try to do more of the same thing, instead of a different thing. Social media network, search engine, free email provider, ISP — it doesn’t matter what your sector is, you can’t count on it being the Biggest Thing Online for longer than five years no matter what you do.
Look at poor old Yahoo!’s struggles — it’s trying to find its way out of its problems by doing a better job of what it has always done, instead of trying to become an entirely different business that can prosper in these very different times. Some of its own products have evolved faster and further than the company itself. Microsoft is fading, MySpace is fading, Google will fade, Facebook will fade, Twitter will fade.
The correct question to ask yourself is, “when my market dominance inevitably ends, how will I transition my business? Do I negotiate an exit now while my valuation is highest? Do I use my market power to acquire future potential businesses? How do I make sure I put all my energies behind those new businesses instead of stifling them because I’m still really running my old business as if it will last forever?”
A couple of other minor points on the project: first being, where’s the mobile numbers? In another five years I expect the mobile web to comprise at least 30% of Australia’s total time online and I’m certain it makes up at least 5% today — I don’t have data but my arthritic thumb say so. It needs to be factored into the present of the Australian web and can’t be ignored in the future.
Second, the interactive chart points back to the AIMIA homepage, which today has an item on the history project, but in six months that will be buried in an archive somewhere and the AIMIA homepage will be all about some other topic. Neither do the Interactive Consortium or Nielsen logos link back to anything specifically about the history project.
Finally, the interactive chart has no detail on the methodology, no Help or FAQ section, or contact details. It doesn’t even allow you to share your favourite mashup of the data with friends/colleagues on your favourite social media or… say… this blog. They haven’t uploaded clips to YouTube or Vimeo. In this day and age, not good enough, young folk.
In my day, we ran our web servers in box in middle of road… mutter, mutter…
