The online ecosystem is concentrated on a number of fronts: search, social, video, news, browsers, etc. Why is this? In this episode, we take a look at why seemingly all aspects of the online world are dominated by just a select few players.
One study that Google ran internally was to see how users ranked various search engines if you basically removed the branding. It turns out, users can’t distinguish between the quality of the results. We think Google is the best, therefore it is the best to you. It’s a valuable brand just as much as a superior technology.
In fact, the very underlying search algorithm itself contributes to an oligopolistic market constellation with regards to websites as a whole. It’s a popularity contest; it’s about being big, loud, famous — this will help you maintain your position.This makes it difficult for new entrants or some dissident views to spread. It doesn’t matter if you have higher quality content, more accurate information, more painstakingly reached conclusions, that doesn’t count. Instead, having other sites linking to your content is key.
Users are waking up to the fact that Google, YouTube, Facebook (et. al.) don’t represent all-encompassing, solutions that offer universal stream of information, but rather, these companies curate their results and outright hide others. People were very quick to abandon Altavista, Yahoo when there was another site with better, richer results. Long term, users, conservative or liberal, are unlikely to want to choose to have their reality curated for them by a company. Meanwhile, new alternative entrants are popping up in every vertical (Bitchute.com for Video, Minds.com for Social, Duckduckgo.com for Search, etc).
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