Editor’s Corner:
IS THE WEB A LEMMINGS’ RUSH TO THE SEA?

Having a web site seems to have become a basic necessity in today’s business world. Most businesses not in the Fortune 10,000 have their corporate brochureware online for any immediate inquiries that come in. Others put up an online store or catalog with the hopes of generating sales.

Although the number of Web sites is expanding daily, the number of sites that people actually visit is shrinking, according to research conducted for the LA Times by Media Matrix. The firm found that 35% of Web surfers’ time is spent on the 50 most popular sites, up from about 27% last year. The top 10 sites garnered about 20% of all time spent on the Web. And in this issue of MWT we quote research that shows web marketers are reverting to traditional media to publicize their sites. For all the promises electronic access appears to offer, right now the critical mass of "eyeballs" is still looking at print media. And for those surfing the Net there are just so many places they end up visiting.

So what’s going on? It’s a lemmings’ rush to the sea, that’s what. The promise of the web is so great, most companies can’t resist getting online. The rush to the web is intense and as irrational as the lemmings sudden race.

If the rule is that only one out of every five new businesses survives the first three years, perhaps we should apply it to the web as well. As great as the growth of sites appears to be, how much "link rot" will we have as web ventures go belly up?

Add to this another rising phenomenon: short shelf life. Have you noticed lately how fast new movies go in and out of distribution in spite of more and more movies coming out each week? With so many movies being released the demand for any one title is certainly diminished. And so after five or six weeks most movies are finished if they haven’t raked in significant cash. The same will be true for high profile web sites. As more and more of them are launched their life spans will decline or they will be ignored altogether.

Most of us have humble web operations. The best we can hope for from these sites is to answer inquiries and serve the needs of our current customer base. If we’re doing that and doing it well, we won’ t have time to rush with the lemmings to the sea. We’ll be busy navigating our way through the cyberterrain.