This takes my vote for statistic of the week.
A decade ago newspaper website homepages averaged just 12 links. Today that number has soared to around 450.
Wow.
Photo: vinx80x/vincenzo
Are readers suffering hyper hyperlink inflation? At what stage does the “more is good” adage become redundant?
New York Times’s Nick Bilton, currently on a book-writing sabbatical, includes the startling numbers in the forthcoming edition of Wired UK magazine, reports the Media Guardian’s Mercedes Bunz on PDA, The Digital Content Blog.
As Bunz reminds us, it was a year ago that Jeff Jarvis proclaimed “links are the currency of the new media economy”, but have newspapers taken the idea a touch too far? LLC (Link Like Crazy) is still seen to be at the heart of distributing content across the internet, but at what point does this become counterproductive? What is the right balance?
Bilton said:
“It is a fascinating fact is that if you go online and visit 200 web pages in one day – which is a simple task when you could email, blogs, youtube etc – you’ll see on average 490,000 words; War & Peace was only 460,000 words.”
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