It had a good run. RIP website.

No doubt, you’ve invested thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on your website development and promotion. The death of websites will not take as long as the death of newspapers. In 2009, at a national Travel Industry Conference in New York, I predicted that the death of websites would come to fruition in 10-15 years. The crowd stared. The panelists (all web developers) scrambled to disprove my radical theory. But, nine years later, there are three immutable reasons my crazy statement is solid.

1.     The loss of uniqueness.

I say this a lot. 9 times out of 10 I can go to a website in any industry, cover up the logo and have NO idea where I am. The homogenized approach to web design is in full effect. In the early days of websites, there were no design standards, no standard CMS. Admittedly, it was U-G-L-Y. This created an advantage to those with a better sense of aesthetic. But, as the web has always held the promise of easy to use and open source, newer platforms hosting more pleasing aesthetics happened. Today, with WordPress powering over 1/3 of the world’s websites, modern design takes on a “block of content” approach. In UX Magazine’s article “Why Web Design is Dead,” author Sergio Nouvel describes this shift as moving from “web pages to web services,” a “[transition] to a push-based model of content consumption, where the right information arrives without you even requesting it…[whereas] web pages are static content that need to be found and visited (pull-based).”

2.    The growth of the connection economy.

In the “old days” we called this peer-to-peer. In my videos from 2007, you can hear me rattle on about how important this new frontier will be. But, I had no clue what kind of explosion and rebranding to “social media” it would actually be. The new digital ecosystems discourage website visitation. You want information on anything? Here it is, here you go. It just so happens that the advertising models for businesses on social media is underpriced. Not for long. Businesses have a unique opportunity over the next 24-36 months to turn paid social ads to earned media space. The winners in this space don’t care if they get organic or paid exposure. And, on another topic (maybe another post?), I believe organic exposure is put way too high on a pedestal. 

Need more convincing that social media is more important than your website? According to data from The National Awareness, Attitudes and Usage study; visitors are 12x more likely to use social media as a source of information than a traditional website, with mobile sites sandwiched in-between.

The shift is to “talk with” not “talk to”. That’s not a prediction. That’s a stone cold fact.

3.    Rapidly evolving technology interface.

Isn’t it funny that the thing in your pocket is 100x more powerful than the computer Reagan used to run the free world? Mobile explosion ushered in an era of visual experience that no computer ever has. As less and less people actually use a desktop (I kind of giggle when I see ‘desktop’ traffic and attribute that to someone who’s slightly behind), apps take center stage. NOT YOUR COMPANY APPS. For the love of all that is holy .. your company app sucks. Guarantee that. #sorrynotsorry As Danny Crichton writes for TechCrunch, “the Web has tried to compete with the ‘mobile web’ concept, but like so many responses to technology disruption, this one seems too little, too late.” Natural language processing is so well evolved, that even using fingers instead of a mouse will soon seem archaic. More on that in my bonus point.

Add to all this that 10 of the biggest Internet properties (notice I did not say websites) command 87% of the traffic on the web, what chance does your business have to steal that marketshare .. not much.

BONUS REASON: The future is ear.

47.3 million adults have access to a smart speaker today. The next generation of smartphones will likely be in your ear. Apple, Amazon and Google all have high-priority projects to work on products that combine the utility of the hearing aid with the entertainment value of a pair of high-end headphones, and potentially much more, say sources. 

“Ultimately, the idea is to steal time from the smartphone,” says Gints Klimanis, of Doppler Labs, “The smartphone will probably never go away completely, but the combination of voice commands and hearing could become the primary interface for anything spontaneous.”

Conclusion: Ok, so you have a big honking website and you’ve spent so much money on it, you don’t want to lose that investment. That’s the rub, it was never an investment. It’s rented space with diminishing interest. Don’t get rid of it. Rethink it and shift future “investment” into attention that corresponds with the year you are in. If you are not an eCommerce company, that’s all you can really bank on. Sure, you can get leads and referrals to partners and ad money from your behemoth website – go ahead and cash in short term. But don’t be surprised that if you don’t shift budget and effort appropriately, that you’ll be caught with your pants down.