Is the link economy of UK news sites managing or making abundance?

It was about a year ago, that the media expert Jeff Jarvis proclaimed: "Links are the currency of the new media economy." But as with every currency, there might be inflation. Nick Bilton illustrates in the upcoming Wired that UK news sites learned their lesson, but maybe they've carried it a bit to the extreme.

Bilton, currently on a book leave from The New York Times, where he works as a user interface specialist and lead researcher, discovered for UK Wired this month, that news sites average around 450 links on their homes pages, whereas 10 years ago they averaged just 12 links per home page.

"If you pick up a US or UK newspaper you'll see four to six stories on the front page and maybe eight to 10 refers to other stories, that's an average total of 12 headlines on one page. In contrast, the average news website has 335 story or section links on their homepage. So we're showing people online 300 more options on one page than we show them in print. And we wonder why people have information overload of content."

With 62% the Guardian is playing it rather low. Its starting page confronts the reader with 1,941 words, 350 individual links and 1,222 linked words. The Mirror Group has the most intensified use of links, with nearly as many linked words as total words on the homepage 1,182 v 1,117 or 94%. The Sun's website displays, with 578, the highest number of individual links, and the homepage of the Daily Mail features the highest number of words with 5,447 words compared with the BBC News site's 879 words.

"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."

Strangely, while the internal linking of news sites rose sharply, the external linking is still way behind, as the Nieman Journalism Lab pointed out.

"The link economy works if you're going to offer something rich to the page but just random links to random stories in the hopes that people will click is not fair to the consumer.", says Bilton.

The The December issue of Wired UK magazine will be out on Thursday, November 5; Nick Bilton's book "I live in the future & here is how it works" will be out in June 2010.