>Gentrification is a poor analogy since the web is not zero sum unlike physical space.
It looks as if it's "not zero sum" because a random user can supposedly check out anything on equal footing, whether it's Facebook.com or some guy's hobby personal website. They're both there and available.
But in reality that's never the case. A person taken at random is never equally likely to visit this or that (except in the sense: I have 50%-50% chances of winning the lottery today: I either win, or I don't). The gentrified one's would have way more exposure, be promoted as way more essential (socially, and even professionally) to be on them, they will have all the trappings of fashion, like modern design, mobile client apps, and such.
Back in 1999 that wasn't yet the case. At least nowhere near to the degree it is today.
This is reflected in viewership numbers of course, where a gentrified behemoth might get 99% of the traffic, and the rest long tail 1%, despite consisting of billion times more websites.
OK but... a personal website gets substantially less traffic than Facebook but does it get more or less traffic than the website owner's profile page on Facebook? If that person keeps a blog on the personal site and occasionally posts on FB, the website wins. If that person posts all the time on Facebook and rarely blogs, the FB profile wins.
I do have a website since last century and I stopped posting on FB since a few years ago. My website gets negligible traffic except scan bots but still more than me on FB. If people google me they might find me on FB and realize that my page is dead. If they insist they'll find my site.
Attention is limited though and that has shifted away from websites like this so maybe it's gentrification of attention