The Internet Trap - How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy - Hardcover

Hindman, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691159262 ISBN 13: 9780691159263

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the online economy

The internet was supposed to fragment audiences and make media monopolies impossible. Instead, behemoths like Google and Facebook now dominate the time we spend online—and grab all the profits from the attention economy. The Internet Trap explains how this happened. This provocative and timely book sheds light on the stunning rise of the digital giants and the online struggles of nearly everyone else—and reveals what small players can do to survive in a game that is rigged against them.

Matthew Hindman shows how seemingly tiny advantages in attracting users can snowball over time. The internet has not reduced the cost of reaching audiences—it has merely shifted who pays and how. Challenging some of the most enduring myths of digital life, Hindman explains why the internet is not the postindustrial technology that has been sold to the public, how it has become mathematically impossible for grad students in a garage to beat Google, and why net neutrality alone is no guarantee of an open internet. He also explains why the challenges for local digital news outlets and other small players are worse than they appear and demonstrates what it really takes to grow a digital audience and stay alive in today’s online economy.

The Internet Trap shows why, even on the internet, there is still no such thing as a free audience.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Matthew Hindman is associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and the author of the award-winning book The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton). He lives in Washington, DC.

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The Internet Trap

How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy

By Matthew Hindman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15926-3

Contents

List of Figures and Tables, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xi, 
1 Rethinking the Attention Economy, 1, 
2 A Tilted Playing Field, 15, 
3 The Political Economy of Personalization, 38, 
4 The Economic Geography of Cyberspace, 62, 
5 The Dynamics of Web Traffic, 82, 
6 Less of the Same: Online Local News, 102, 
7 Making News Stickier, 132, 
8 The "Nature" of the Internet, 162, 
Appendix on Data, Methodology, and Models, 181, 
Notes, 193, 
Bibliography, 205, 
Index, 225, 

CHAPTER 1

Rethinking the Attention Economy

The American Beauty rose can be produced in its splendor and fragrance only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it.

— John D. Rockefeller, Jr. on trusts, quoted in Ida Tarbell's

The History of the Standard Oil Company

In early 2000, Google conducted one of its first online experiments. The result was a disaster.

Google's mistake started with a simple question: How many results should it return per search query? The young company had always given users ten results, because that was what previous leader AltaVista had done. Competing search engines like Yahoo! returned twenty, though, and focus groups suggested that users preferred more. Google's researchers decided to try a real world test, splitting off groups of users to receive twenty, twenty-five, or thirty results instead of ten. But when they checked a month later, they found — to their shock — that more results had produced huge drops in traffic. Searches in the thirty-result group had fallen by more than 20 percent, and tens of thousands of users had abandoned Google altogether.

The researchers rushed to figure out what had gone wrong. Were users overwhelmed by more results? The data showed no evidence of this. Were users just clicking the "next" button less? Few users clicked on the next button to begin with, so this effect was tiny.

Google eventually traced the traffic drop to a surprising source: It took a fraction of a second longer to return more results. The control group waited 0.4 seconds on average, while those in the twenty-five-result group waited 0.9 seconds. Over a day or two this added lag meant little. But as the weeks wore on, the effects of that extra half-second multiplied. People visited Google less often, and performed fewer searches when they did visit. Even when the experiment ended, slowed-down users did not come back immediately. Their usage started to increase again, but from the new, lower baseline. There are several morals to the story of Google's early experiments, which this book will unpack at length. But the most important lesson is about how to understand online advantage.

Digital survival depends on stickiness — firms' ability to attract users, to get them to stay longer, and to make them return again and again. Stickiness is like a constantly compounding internet interest rate, in which a small early edge in growth creates a huge long-term gap. Differences in stickiness do not add up, they multiply together.

Google's ascent from upstart to the world's most valuable company came from learning this lesson. Google spent billions to make its site faster — but it also did much, much more. It reinvented itself not as a search engine but as a bundle of the stickiest online activities: email, video, maps, mobile, even office software. And in its pursuit of an ever-larger slice of users' attention Google rebuilt the fundamental infrastructure of the internet: new data centers larger than any before, new fiber optic cables, new ways of running rich applications over the web and a speedy new browser to match, new forms of artificial intelligence running on new types of computer chips, even a new mobile operating system that now runs on two billion active smartphones.

How did online audiences and digital revenue get so concentrated? What does this concentration mean for business, politics, news, even national security? Is online oligopoly inevitable, or is there a way out of the internet trap? These are the questions this book seeks to answer. For us today, just as for Google two decades ago, the first lesson is this: small effects that compound quickly are not small effects.

A Scarcity of Attention

The World Wide Web is the most astonishingly successful technology of modern times, a technology that now underpins our social, economic, and political lives. You likely ordered this book online — or even had it wirelessly delivered to your phone or tablet or reader. The web is so popular, powerful, and omnipresent that we forget just how badly it has failed at its original goal.

The World Wide Web was built in an explicit attempt to eliminate hierarchy in communications. It tried to do this by combining other technologies developed with that same goal in mind. The first such technology was hypertext, originated in the 1960s by sociologist Ted Nelson. Hypertext documents were designed to be consumed nonsequentially. Links within the hypertext could point to other relevant passages, definitions, graphics, tables, or even other documents on the same computer. The second technology was the internet, which by the 1980s had become ubiquitous in universities and research labs. The internet had been created as a peer-to-peer network, in which there were no central hubs: each computer could send and receive data with any other computer.

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, saw that hypertext could piggyback on top of the internet. Instead of being sandboxed within a single computer, hypertext could link documents on computers continents apart. Berners-Lee called the project the World Wide Web to emphasize that "any node can be linked to any other," and to reflect "the distributed nature of the people and computers that the system could link." In the opening sentence of the WWW's project overview, one of the very first pages online, Berners-Lee declared, "There is no top to the Web." All pages, and all sites, were supposed to be created equal.

If there were no "top" sites on the World Wide Web in 1991, there certainly are now. The fact that some sites and apps are far more popular than others is the most important fact of online life. We network on Facebook, while competing sites get less than 1 percent of Facebook's traffic. We search the web using Google or Bing, and competing search engines have minuscule market share. We read and write our email using Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft. We use eBay for auctions, and we buy our books (and increasingly everything else) from Amazon. Among hundreds of millions of sites on the web, the four largest internet firms — Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo! — capture a third of all web visits.

Concentration in online revenue is even more dramatic. The ten largest digital firms have always dominated digital advertising, taking three-quarters of ad dollars since at least the mid-1990s. But the shift to mobile and video has intensified concentration at the very top. As of mid-2016, Google and Facebook together combined for more than 73 percent of digital advertising in the United States, a remarkable duopoly over a $60 billion-a-year industry.

At its core, this is a book about the attention economy. It focuses on the interplay between...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691159262
• ISBN 13: 9780691159263
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar