Do you ever stop and wonder about those websites that seem perpetually on the cusp of greatness, but haven’t quite cracked the big time, and instead constantly play second fiddle to the big corporations? As in Chinese philosophy, to every Yin there must be a Yang, and for every Simon, there is a Garfunkel.* For every wildly successful multi-billion dollar internet start up that contributes new verbs to the common vernacular [‘Did you friend her? Nah, I googled her and she’s wanted for armed robbery in three states’ etc] there is another site which offers remarkably similar services yet hasn’t quite reached the critical mass of users to become the popular standard.
Google > Yahoo!
Did you know that Yahoo! is the second largest search engine on the web? Seems like a pretty good deal for them, huh? The problem is, the first place holder, Google, holds 85 per cent of the search query market. Yahoo! comes in at second place with 6 per cent. That’s the equivalent of Usain Bolt winning the 100m as his competitors cross the 20m mark. Hardly a satisfying second place, is it?
Beyond the search engine itself, Yahoo! offers similar services to Google, in terms of webmail, videos, maps, and advertising. So why is there such a large discrepancy between the two? Google made a name for itself due to its search algorithm being notoriously accurate, at least more accurate than its competitors. Whether or not Yahoo!’s search system is now on par with Google is irrelevant: during the critical period of people flocking to the internet (new millennium onwards) Google proved time and again the best search tool. Searching with Google is so seamless (especially if you’re using Chrome) that I hardly think of myself as ‘using Google’ anymore. I just think of something I need to know, type it in, and it appears before me. Google has effectively become an invisible hand in the information gathering process, and this is surely the goal of any serious search engine company.
Similar examples of complete market saturation exist outside the internet. Band-aids, Bubble-Wrap, Eskys, Stanley Knives, are all examples of ‘Generiscized Trademarks’, in which the product name has actually transcended its own company or service and become the standardised term for any similar product. Google is approaching this now, with most people using ‘Google’ as a term which incorporates virtually any sort of internet search. Of course, with an 85 per cent market share, chances are most people actually are ‘Googling’ everything.
YouTube > Dailymotion
Daily-whawha? At least, that was my reaction when I discovered French video hosting site Dailymotion was the second largest video sharing website in the world. Much like the Google/Yahoo comparison, Dailymotion is a fair way behind YouTube, with 60,000,000 video views per day compared to YouTubes astronomical 1,200,000,000. Of course, YouTube’s success is helped by the fact that it is owned by Google, so that many video searches undertaken by Google will inevitably direct you to YouTube.
However, YouTube was a successful site in its own right before the takeover, and Google have been smart enough not to try and merge YouTube with Google Video, but instead keep the recognisable branding that YouTube built. What’s even more interesting is that before the takeover, Google Video never really came close to the sort of traffic YouTube was generating, despite the fact that Google was the largest search engine at the time.
YouTube, like Google, found success with its easily useable interface. Videos were easy to find and upload, utilisation of attractive site design and memorable branding (the red loading bar is particularly iconic) and clever innovations has meant that YouTube has secured a place as the third most popular site in the world, behind Google and Facebook.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the Dailymotion website, and it was founded only one month after YouTube in 2005. However, like Google, YouTube has become the pop culture standard for a generation of users. Additionally (and I have no idea how much influence this has) it takes approximately 0.45 seconds less time to type youtube.com than it does to type dailymotion.com. Add in the fact that Chrome users can now press ‘Tab’ and search YouTube content instantly, and it becomes hard to see how Dailymotion (or anyone else) will come close to knocking YouTube off its perch as the No. 1 video site.
Facebook > Myspace
I feel particularly privileged that I can actually remember the day I signed up to Facebook. I’m trying really hard to hold onto that memory because it’s probably something that one day I’ll be able to tell a room full of really young people and they’ll laugh at me. I have a feeling that in the future no-one will ‘remember’ when they signed up to Facebook but instead it will just happen, like being able to tie your shoelaces or riding a bike or completing puberty. Kids will probably be signed up for an account when they’re born and then that’ll be the end of it.
One of my most distinct memories of joining Facebook was the fact that it was a social networking site that wasn’t MySpace. I mentioned above how hard difficult it appears for Yahoo to overtake Google or for Dailymotion to overtake YouTube, but don’t take for granted that it can’t happen. Facebook proved that you can take on the biggest rival in your industry and win convincingly.
How did they do it? Whole books could and will be written on why Facebook has succeeded. Briefly, Facebook started in American colleges, and in terms of pop culture, everybody on the planet wants to be doing what American university students are doing. If they’re on Facebook, then everybody will want to be on Facebook. It didn’t take long before other universities and high-schools were DEMANDING that Zuckerberg cut them into his network. When you have a controlled release like Facebook did, it creates hype, and people want what they don’t have. It was marketing genius.
But it wasn’t all to do with marketing. Facebook is actually a remarkable product. It would pretty much sell itself. It has been theorised that Facebook taps into basic human instincts and social practices, and this partly accounts for its widespread success. Zuckerberg has a knack for programming highly addictive software. The timing of FB’s release was ideal too. People had slowly learned the social network game on MySpace, but Facebook gave them something to really sink their teeth into. Innovations such as simple photo uploading and tagging, the newsfeed (which people hated at first), poking, liking and the prominence of the status update revolutionised the social networking world.
Will anybody be able to pull off the social networking coup de grace? People talk quietly of ‘the Facebook killer’, the service that is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace. Google are launching a new service, Google+, which they hope will replace Facebook as the social networking standard. It’s hard to see how they will achieve it. People already have much more invested in their Facebook profile than they ever did in MySpace, and Facebook is much bigger than MySpace ever was. Google+ will have to be something incredibly remarkable in order to overthrow Facebook, but if anybody was going to pull it off, then you’d think the largest internet company in the world with millions of dollars behind it probably has the best chance.
Wikipedia > Scholarpedia
Sick and tired of people telling you that Wikipedia isn’t a viable source? Why not try out Scholarpedia, the free encyclopedia that not quite anybody can edit. As opposed to Wikipedia’s delightful free-for-all, Scholarpedia’s articles are written by scholars from around the world, and are peer-reviewed. If everybody’s quest for knowledge is so great that a site like Wikipedia can become the seventh most popular website in the world, why isn’t Scholarpedia visited just as much, as it provides reputedly better knowledge? (FYI, Scholarpedia is ranked at about the 300,000th most visited site in the world).
Of course, most web users don’t necessarily want totally correct information; they just want a lot of it. Wikipedia’s lack of exclusiveness means that an incredibly wide range of topics are covered, including things that generally scholars wouldn’t write about. The longest article on the English Wikipedia is a list describing ‘Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition Monsters’. I’d like to see someone with a degree in that. Of course, this is really the stuff that people want to know about, as opposed to say, politics in Iran.
Furthermore, I have argued before that it is debateable how ‘unreliable’ Wikipedia really is. Many Wikipedia pages are guarded so carefully by those with a vested interest in them that vandalism becomes incredibly difficult. It seems that people have embraced Wikipedia, and are willing to defend its stance as the sum of most of humankind’s knowledge. It would appear that popular opinion is worth more on the internet than a doctorate. Whether or not this is a positive development is debateable, but most people are smart enough to recognise Wikipedia as an open source site, and treat its information accordingly.
So there you have it; a not particularly comprehensive guide to the world’s biggest websites and their poorer, uglier stepsisters. It must be kept in mind that the secondary websites are still, for the most part, multi-million dollar corporations, with the sort of web traffic that many can only dream about. I’m sure the founders of MySpace, Yahoo!, Dailymotion and Scholarpedia probably sleep quite happily at night. But it’s interesting that there only ever seems to be room for one at the top. And being at the top in the digital age is about more than raking in huge profits. It’s about having your company, your brand and your image representing your industry. Your company doesn’t just provide a service anymore; it provides a representation of the zeitgeist, which is something that immortalises corporations. Google is internet search, just as Facebook is social networking, and YouTube is online video. That sort of success and brand recognition can’t be bought by advertising no matter how hard you try: it can only be endorsed by the masses.
*Please don’t take this statement to mean that I have any sort of grasp of Chinese philosophy. P.S. sorry Art.
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