The Suburban Web

(Posted by Jarid Lukin, Director of E-Commerce)

Fred Wilson (one of Alacra's board members) is looking for a new word to describe, what he calls, the "de-portalization" of the Web.  As Fred desribes it, de-portalization is "about new places on the Internet that will capture more attention over time and more of the growth".  Given my previous success at word coinage, I figured I'd give it 1 more shot... :)

After reading Fred's original post on the de-portalization of Yahoo and Keith's follow-up post, one analogy keeps popping in my head: Suburbanization

Web traffic is spreading out from a few major (urban) centers to many more smaller (suburban) areas, frequently built around the bigger sites (sights?).  Think about it.  In Web 1.0, you went to the portals for all of your municipal services (email, stock quotes, news, etc.).  Now that the Web has expanded, you can get many of those services elsewhere.  But, you still do commute back to the portals as necessary; you just don't live there anymore.  You could even make the argument that broadband is the transportation mechanism that allows much of this traffic to flow back and forth, much as railroads and cars led to the development of the real suburbs.

As a sanity check, I read the Wikipedia page on suburbia.  Here are a couple of snippets:

• Citizens of a classical city often chose to build homes outside the city, sacrificing the protection of the walls for less expensive land and more space and privacy.
Let's see, more privacy...  Sounds like the argument many sites use while competing against pieces of the Google City (Gmail, Calendar, GTalk, etc.).  Also, cheaper space/storage/start-up costs is what's allowing so many of these suburban web companies to sprout up.

• The suburbs and more distinct settlements around a town or city may look towards the urban area for goods, services and employment opportunities.
Can anyone say Web 2.0?  i.e. Google APIs, Amazon Web Services, Yahoo's aquisitions, etc.  Enough said.

Granted, “suburbanization” might not be as economical a word-coinage as “freemium” (as Chris Taylor of Business 2.0 described it), but I think it’s as descriptive.  Besides, "webburbia"/"webburbs" both sound like something you get after a night of drinking (and they're hard to spell).  ;)

As I see it, the resurgence of Web 2.0 startups has led to a "web sprawl" (according to Wikipedia, "sprawl" has a negative connotation so I'll leave it up to you to determine if this is a good or bad thing).  But, I think the suburban web is real and is here to stay.  What do you think?

Comments

[David Meerman Scott]

Hey Jarid,

I too like Freemium. Nice.

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't de-portalization the same as The Long Tail that Chris Anderson coined? Aren't we just talking about The Long Tail Web where things happen at the fringes -- where people's real interests lie -- rather than at the portal which must appeak to the masses?

David Meerman Scott

[Jarid]

Hi David,
According to Wikipedia (I love that site!), Anderson argues that products that are in low demand can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers, if the distribution channel is large enough.

So, in this case, with the internet being the distribution channel, I agree that you would, in fact, expect to see a long tail of web sites. However, what I believe Fred and Keith were getting out with "de-portalization" (which I called suburbanization) was the transformation or flattening of internet traffic from the few big portals to the many sites of the long tail, or what I called the Suburban Web.

So, I guess you could make the argument that suburbanization should really be called something like Long Tailification. Or maybe you could describe the rise of suburbs as the long tail of cities. ;)
--Jarid