Internet usage patterns

By Kristoffer Bohmann, Bohmann Usability

Internet usage patterns. Four Internet companies control half of the time users spend on the Web. The companies are AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, Yahoo and Napster. What can be learnt from this:

Apparently unrelated mergers will take place to achieve at least one goal: Increase the number of page views in a certain user segment. For instance, AOL and Time Warner merged to strengthen their future competencies to deliver broadband content thereby creating a market leader in the entertainment business.
Large sites will grow larger resulting in higher revenues. Jakob Nielsen point out that strategic use of the Web should easily result in values of a dollar or more per page used. This is actually what happens on sites such as Amazon and Yahoo. Yahoo Shopping host stores on the Yahoo.com domain and charge stores for the service. Amazon Toys is operated entirely by Toys R Us. Even the Toys R Us homepage is hosted by Amazon who is making more dollars on this set-up than they could do on their own in the toy industry.
Smaller sites will only survive the competition if they provide highly focused and valuable content that is easy to access.

Kristoffer Bohmann