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What if the Web is dead?

Business | Technology

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired US, suggests the web is dead, but if this is true what would this mean for business and marketing?

What he means is that the web, as in web pages accessed by browsers, is in danger of being superseded by the app revolution. Here, instead of surfing a multitude of web pages, users are migrating to apps from trusted sources that provide narrow but specific functionality. He defines this as a more proprietary and closed internet experience where “fast beats flexible”. The internet is still the enabling mechanism; it’s just that both humans and the machine nodes on the network are using it to communicate in a slightly different way.

But hold on a minute, web browsing tends to follow a Pareto profile anyway, with users frequenting a relatively small, concentrated cluster of sites with a very long tail on infrequent or single visit pages. Apps certainly reinforce that cluster effect, but it is human nature to narrow such endless possibility down to more manageable options.

This trend to apps is being driven, generally in a forward direction, by several underlying shifts. Anderson mentions the evolving commercial interests of the content providers including media companies and others. But it is being enabled by the rapid growth of mobile internet devices that we have discussed before. This means that users are using communications and assimilating information in new ways, at different times and in different locations.

How will these changes affect businesses of all types that have now become accustomed to the web as a primary medium for engagement with key audiences? How should businesses set out their stalls on an internet that is more app-centric? As far as we can see, the answer is not dissimilar to the response provoked by the rise of social media. There is no clear cut answer because it depends on the business and its communities. It is another way to engage that will sit alongside existing approaches and the trick again is to understand how your target audiences behave and how and where they want to connect with you.

For b2b technology businesses we suspect little will change in the short term. Those engaging with consumers however must start to explore and embrace the mobile immediacy of this new approach. Meanwhile, sports and entertainment businesses have to a large extent already jumped on the bandwagon, with free and paid apps already feeding the insatiable thirst for information from and engagement with teams, events and championships.

Chris Ritchie

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