The decline of webpages

The webpage has long been the atomic unit of the internet. For publishers, the webpage was the starting point of what they made, even as user patterns shifted to make the homepage less important, the side doors of search and social distribution funneled ultimately to the page. It was on the page that publishers made most of their money.

The webpage is long out of date. Web 2.0 saw an influx of use of Ajax and other tech to gussy up webpages to make them less static and more dynamic. An unfortunate phase kicked off by Snowfall saw publishers try to make webpages more “immersive” and clunky and unintuitive. The distributed media craze saw publishers try to skip the page to go find audiences on platforms, or “fish where the fish are,” as executives loved to say.