Social networking goes to the long tail
I have written before about how whilst the growth of the leading socnets is flattening niche socnets seems to be accelerating and the success of Ning is further evidence of that trend.
These charts from Techcrunch tell the story.
In both traffic and socnets they host they have grown 5-6x in a year, and a quick bit of maths shows just how far they have travelled down the long tail. At 3.5m uniques in Feb and 200,000 socnets on the site, the average Ning socnet has 17.5 unique visitors. The maths is crude as it assumes all the visitors are only members of one Ning socnet and I would also expect that rather like blogs many of these socnets are idle, but my point stands even if the 17.5 is an order of magnitude out.
If the trend to niche socnets continues then data portability will start to become more and more important, which will in itself unleash another wave of innovation.
March 31st, 2008 at 10:18 pm
I think the growth will be in the use of smaller, more focused, niche social networks that cater to a particular interest, hobby or vocation. These smaller sites will allow like-minded individuals and groups to connect, exchange ideas and receive genuine and useful support.
These kinds of sites will also be attractive to advertisers as they get targeted demographics to spend their online advertising budgets on.
Thanks to sites such as ning, anyone can start a niche social network about anything. There’s also a search engine to help find niche social networks that lists thousands of networks for a whole range of subjects, http://findasocialnetwork.com
April 4th, 2008 at 10:59 am
[...] To complicate matters further, we have multiple social networks in different areas of our lives and most of us like to keep them mostly independent from one another. This has been widely discussed for professional and personal networks but also applies to our interest areas - which is why I’m a believer in the power of niche socnets. [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 9:53 am
[...] From the perspective of our investment in WAYN I hope this is more evidence of the shift in activity towards sector or niche focused socnets. [...]