Cast your mind back to the early days on the World Wide Web. Back to the days when new, young entrepreneurs were setting up all sorts of websites and talking about a new media landscape. A landscape where big media conglomerates would no longer be in control. Instead anyone could set up a website and offer news, views and information to anyone who was willing to listen. The low cost, easy access technology of the web would democratise the media world.

Well, as we now know things didn’t quite work out like that.

For the first few years ‘traditional media’ was slow to get on to the web, while at the same time a slew of new media sites were being established most of which were slowly chipping away at the market share of the traditional media. Just look at how the circulation of just about every newspaper has decreased as web use has increased. People could now get news and information when they wanted it and more to the point, they could choose to receive it from a source that reflected their views or way of life.

The web also created whole new kinds of media, social networking is a good example of this. Social networking is a marketers dream. Just think about it, millions of people creating, exchanging and consuming information. Even if there is little money to be made directly from running a social media site, it could be used to promote other products and services and the information that could be gleamed from analysing users habits would be marketing gold.

The problem though is that far from being a cheap, demcratising form of media, the web was actually bloody expensive. In order to set up a sizable web presence, you had to borrow millions in venture capital. To all intents and purposes the web we now know was set up using nothing but borrowed money. Naturally, in the web gold rush some sites succeeded and some (well, loads actually) failed miserably. For the ones that succeeded, the venture capitalists wanted a return on their investment.

Come the new millennium and the old traditional media conglomerates had cottoned on to the fact that the web was here to stay and was only going to become more and more influential in peoples everyday lives. The old media companies had something the hip new web companies didn’t - money to spend. So they started buying up web properties left, right and centre. Let me list a few examples of popular websites that have been bought up by traditional media conglomerates…

MySpace, PhotoBucket - News Corporation
Bebo - owned by TimeWarner
iVillage - NBC Universal
iFilm, Atom Films - Viacom

It’s almost certain that many other well known, independent websites will eventually be swallowed up by similar conglomerates sooner or later.

Of course the web itself has created a few new conglomerates of its, eBay and Google immediately spring to mind. They may not be as bad as the old conglomerates in may peoples eyes, but if they buy up more and more websites then choice is reduced somewhat.

We all thought that the web would give us choice and new ideas, which it has to a certain extent. But the old media has been careful to make sure that no new internet upstarts take away any of their market share.

Come to think of it, were the old media companies slow to catch on to the web? Or did they know that the web was going to be a big and they were just waiting for the new web companies to mature so that they could buy up they choicest properties? I like to think so. After all media companies are usually the best as latching on to and profiting from new trends.

The web does offer a lot of choice, far more than we have ever had in the past. But the media conglomerates are pushing their way in and reducing choice as well as using their considerable marketing muscle to prevent new entrants from getting a foothold. So rather than the web being a liberating medium that would allow anyone to publish anything, so long as someone wanted to read it. What we actually have is more of the same, just in a different format.

That said, things are changing. It is now cheaper than ever to set up a big web presence, the technical costs are considerably lower than what they were a few years ago. And you no longer need a big markting budget, so long as you can get dcent word of mouth advertising through social networks and the like. So maybe we will see a web with a diverse range of independent sites all compting with the big media comapnies after all? I do hope so.

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