Trouble at Yahoo!?
November proved to be a pretty big loss for famed portal Yahoo! and a victory for social-networking site MySpace. For the first time, MySpace recorded a higher number of page hits than Yahoo.Read about it here.
It's a qualified victory for MySpace, to be sure. Yahoo still wins out in unique visitors; specifically, Yahoo got 130 million unique views as opposed to MySpace's 57.2 million. Still, page hits is a critical statistic. Less people visit MySpace, but they do so more often and for longer periods of time than they visit Yahoo.
Coupled with the recent reorganization, it seems like the Internet behemoth that is Yahoo is having a hard time adapting to its fast-moving competition. Google is out-earning Yahoo by leaps and bounds, and now MySpace has out-performed Yahoo in page hits.
I believe that underpinning this story is the simple fact that we've talked about in class since September: the Internet is moving toward an individual focus. MySpace's page hits have been growing at a huge rate and will likely continue to do so while Yahoo's statistics are slowing and trudging.
I think that this trend will continue, and I believe that it is very relevant to blogging and online journalism. It's the final week of the semester, so there's no better time than now to tie this in to the larger picture. Blogging is the future of journalism, whether you like it or not. The Internet is becoming one huge discussion rather than a series of unconnected pages of information, and this is for the best.
There will always be the problem of deciding who are the good bloggers with verifed information and who are the bad bloggers trying to fullfil some political agenda, but that's part of the idea. The basic element of credible journalism, trust, exists exactly as it does in traditional media.
Blogging is becoming a little more mainstream every day, and one day it will be if it isn't already. Statistics like in the article above all point in that direction. The Internet and how we consume news will be very different 10 or even 5 years from now, I think that much is almost guarenteed.
posted by tromano @ 12:57 PM
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