Wired, The Web Is Dead? Your Graph Sucks.

The old men of the web at Wired recently posted a graph showing the drastic decline in “web” traffic over the last decade.  Problem with the graph is that it normalizes everything to a constant bandwidth.  Unfortunately, there was significantly less overall activity in 1990 than in 2010, so this paints a wildly misleading picture.  These guys have a chart showing bandwidth usage since 1983.  Using that, here’s what Wired’s graph looks like (I took slices at 1990, 2000, and 2010 and adjusted their size based on the bandwidth data cited above):

Web usage with bandwidth included.

Oh, the web is alive, gents.  Enjoy your iPads.

UPDATE: Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing had the same reaction, and his graph is cooler: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/08/17/is-the-web-really-de.html