Who owns the Web?
Has the people's medium been taken over by big media? Or does attention to the big companies and their popular sites, the most obvious part of the Web, miss the energy and verve of the Internet?
In our inaugural report last year, we suggested that there were, in effect, two Internets: one that aggregated large numbers of users around a limited number of sites, and another that was rapidly changing, full of energy and innovation.
The success of blogs in 2004 (see Online Audience [1]) suggests that this other, less visible Internet is even more robust now than a year earlier. But data on where people go on the Internet also suggest that at the same time the biggest sites are getting even bigger.
In examining the top sites with the most traffic, there were three main story lines worth noting in 2004.