Google Dominate Search and Upstream Traffic
Hitwise have just posted Google delivers over a third of all UK traffic in which they discuss the amount of UK traffic Google get.
Here they are talking not just of the Google.com/co.uk domains but also Gmail.com Youtube, Blogger etc. Google get over a third of all Internet traffic in the UK. They are in effect controlling not just the means of distribution with 90% of the UK search market but also increasingly the destinations visited too.
This should be a cause for concern for everyone outside of Google. They have wrapped up the search market, and now are making further inroads into publishing. They saw all the traffic being lost from Google as people where only on a search engine for a few moments before engaging with other properties, and they’ve taken step after step to keep the traffic. The phrase “to have one’s cake and eat it too” comes to mind, and we’ve willingly baked them the cake, helped them cut it up and now we feed on the crumbs they leave over.
The Android platform for mobile is their attempt to take control of the mobile market, which will eventually become as large as the desktop market is now. Notice I don’t say the “mobile search market”. Android will allow Google to control the mobile platform in the same way that Microsoft did with the desktop.
If Google continue to take strides into the publishing model just what will be left for the rest of us? Traffic to their top 100 sites is up from 30% to 36% (March ‘08) of total UK traffic in the last year, then we can predict that within a year they will have over 40% and could have 50% of the upstream within two or three years. Outisde of Google’s traffic, our visitors will continue to increase for a while as the total internet population grows, but once that steadies we’ll increasingly find sites plateauing except for advances made against one another when one set of SEO techniques increases a site’s reach over anothers’ or a particular site becomes hot on social media for a while.
Then if Google ever moves directly into the niches we’re in, it really is game over.