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Are the most popular websites at risk for being displaced?

In some of my posts I predict that facebook will be worth a trillion dollars in valution and that there will be never be any viable competitors for facebook, digg, youtube, and myspace. Those web 2.0 social networking sites in addition to google will continue to dominate the internet for an indefinite period of time.

However, a common refuting argument is that popular websites are displaced by newer, better sites and thus once popular websites eventually loose their appeal. The most example used is how friendster, alta vista, yahoo, classmates.com, and lycos-all once dominant sites were displaced by better sites. Alta vista, lycos, and yahoo was displaced by Google. Friendster and Classmates lost signifigant marketshare to Myspace and Facebook.

So by that logic isn’t the demise of the current popular websites; facebook, myspace,google innevitable? Acuatlly such a fate isn’t innevitable. The argument that the marketshare these websites will be sized by a newer better websites is flawed. For example, yahoo mail and hotmail still have dominance of free email market for the past decade in spite of the fact there have been thousands of competitors offering more feature laden free email services. But why do hotmail and yahoo mail STILL dominate, and by such a large margin? And why will myspace,youtube,facebook, and google CONTINUE to reign for quite possibly the lifetime of the internet?

The reason those areguments are flawed and can’t be applied to facebook, myspace,youtbe, or google is because the total ‘pool’ of potential internet users has already been exploited. Ten to seven years ago the internet was still emerging and most Americans didn’t have internet access or expressed much interest in using the internet. Only a small majority of Ameircans had heard of search engines or social networking. Lyco, Yahoo and Alta Vista were able to sieze a smll amount of marketshare, but there will still tens of million of Americans who had never heard of search engines.

Then Google came along and began to capture the remaining market share that Alta Vista, Lycos, and Yahoo had not yet siezed. As more Americans went online this created more marketshare for google. Eventually google achived a large enough userbase where it reached a ‘critical mass’.  At this point, google began to graw users away from yahoo, alta viosta, and lycos. Presently almost every American has internet and is aware of the existance of search engines. A new seacrh engine trying to compte with Google will encounter an insurmountable challenge of finding marketshare since unline in 1998 when google emergered there are virtually NO more internet users who have NOT heard of search engines to market to.

The same process also applies to transition of Friendster Classmates users to Facebook and Myspace.  Since the virtually the entire ‘pool’ of internet users is already  aware of social networking there is no more room for any new enties into that market. It would take a massive marketing budget and a superior product for any new social networking site to be able to stand any chance of displacing Myspace or Facebook’s lead.

2 Responses to “Are the most popular websites at risk for being displaced?”

Comment from Michael Boateng
Time October 4, 2007 at 7:48 pm

That was quite a lengthy one. Infact a similar thing is happening in Ghana where i come from. For the past 10 years only one Ghanaian website [ghanaweb.com] has dominated the market and its so interesting that other sites have come and gone … yet its still strong.

I did a little check on alexa to see the top ranking websites in Ghana at the moment

1. ghanaweb.com - 10,091
2. myjoyonline.com - 37,185
3. modernghana.com - 89,581
4. ghanabase.com - 97,841
5. ghanamusic.com - 108,009

Interestingly all these are mainly news websites and they don’t do so much of social networking.

Infact for me as a blogger am just waiting for a day when a new website will come into the scene with interesting features.