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Tiny Sites Aren't Small Potatoes
xtrucial writes "Jakob Nielsen of usability fame has a new article up about the perhaps-unexpected power of tiny websites: 'Considering that the Web as a whole will have about 4 trillion page views this year, the [low-traffic] sites might seem irrelevant with their pitiful millions of page views. But within their niche they dominate.'" (In particular, Nielsen is talking about weblogs.)
Often when I use Google to search for something obscure, there's one or two people that have written something truly informative/helpful about it. More often than not, it's someone's blog.
Till Slashdot links to it.
Duh.
it was so noticable why does the world not Know ??
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Well, this is certainly a breakthrough: "Sites that are more popular get more hits, but sites that are less popular still get hits." Wow.
barzelay.net
Yeah I guess the blogs win then.
I just wanted to speak up and say:
That guy bugs the shit out of me.
Period.
--
s'wut i sed.
The majority of blogs are on Blog sites or fourth level entries with a port number tagging along.
The "tiny" weblog won't be prevalent for long as the larget ones get advertising and the smaller ones are drowned out by "free blog" sites.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The day your sites are legible at 1600x1200 I may pay attention to your "usablilty" articles. However, I faind the exceedingly long lines of text your sites produce hard to read, and so I choose to pay attention to those who practice a real, applicable sense of usablilty.
I'm sure you have many good things to say, I just wish it didn't hurt my eyes to read it.
OK, Mod me as offtopic / troll now. =P
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
I've made about four-trillion websites with about one hit each.
Justin Timberlake's blog
And Knotmag isn't bad either.
tcd004
Slashdot!
...just kidding!] musings ramble from general science to space to biotech. Recommended dose: twice a day.
From the article:
Call it a guilty pleasure. You're not necessarily attracted to it, but you can't resist it's charm. Constantly updated with info from dark corners of the web you wouldn't otherwise visit, Slashdot is still the most recognized and informed science-related blog on the net. Intelligent [Ha!
Three cheers for Slashdot!
(It's on page 98 of the July edition, if you're looking for it.
It took longer because it didn't have a win/win label at corporate places but it got there nonetheless.
:-)
Now you can always look down at personal or hobbyists sites or blogs, but they do have the potential to capture certain events in time in a much more intense way (plus feedback) than the conventional and certainly the Big 5 media corps could ever dream of.
It's like IM or SMS, it's a phenomenon that attracts many people and they build it while engaging, at least at the start. And any corp not smart enough to understand it or to find an obvious toll lock will either leave or loose or sue in that market.
And you know what, if they can't turn blogging into a corporately controlled thing than its usefullness might perhaps been only understated
People will google if needed for what they want to read/see/hear.
The big boys probably cannot be bothered to put up a site on growing blueberries. Where's the profit in it? Oh sure, if one corner of one portion of one of their consumer outlets of the corporate spigot wants to do a piece on blueberries because their latest polling found a 3.4% increase in interest in a key demographic in a semi-important market for them, they will post some corporate-ugly site on blueberries.
Meanwhile, the guy or gal who really enjoys growing blueberries will put up a site out of the love of the activity -- and it will show in the way they write about blueberries. Those who are interested will seek that site out rather than the Blueberry, Inc. (R) (all rights reserved) (copy anything from us and feel our lawyer's wrath) site. It only gets 100 or 200 hits a day? The site owner is thrilled.
People speaking to people directly. That's the Web, that's what it's for, that's what the megacorps would love to curtail or corral. But the Web will always be about people speaking to people. In that context, small works.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
- Big sites have generic content
- Small sites have specific content
- Advertisers will advertise on small sites because they have "targeted viewership"
Ok, anyone ever hear of economies of scale? Let's say I have a site that is super-duper specialized. It only has content relating to red staplers with blue logos on them. It's going to be really hard for companies like swingline to- Find my site
- Negotiate a deal for ad space
- Get the marketing department to cut me a check for 14 dollars each month
They'll go with the big stapler fan sites and avoid all the paperwork. You know it, I know it.But within their niche they dominate.
That's why it's a niche, not mainstream. Macintosh, Red Meat, Amish, et cetera.
The coolest voice ever.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
click the link ... was meant to be ... funny
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
yes they are !
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Put a keyword of "sex" on your website and you get forgotten. Put "zoophilia stories" and make the stories good quality and you get quite a few visitors. Ah. And advertise! :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"But within their niche they dominate.'"
And what niche would that be? People whose lives are so devoid of substance that they spend hours each day reading about the life of someone more concerned with documenting their life than living it?
Weblogs... bleh.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Here is an example of an influential small website.
Just as small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy, small websites are the backbone of the internet.
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
...and make no money. As usual, Jakob Nielsen slants the data in a way that seems so very important. But, almost no small sites make any money. Why isn't that the real story? Bah!!
As usual, Jakob throws shit against the wall. A little sticks, but a lot of it does not stick. Why do people ignore this? For example, he predicted micropayments, which would be great for small web sites. Are micropayments viable now? No! They sucked in 2000 and they suck now. (Good idea, but, micropayments suck!)
Last year I wrote Spanking Jakob Nielsen. I'm just so tired of how he throws around ideas and "important" data and people got nuts. Have you ever noticed that he rarely points to sites outside of useit.com and he often is selling his usability reports? Drives me insane...
How to Download YouTube Videos
If he counts blogs as individual sites, there must be millions on /..org along!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
That in the niche of puny websites, puny websites rule. Great article!
goatse won.
Table-ized A.I.
s/a/e in 'than'
Higher resolution diplays are designed so that the fonts are displayed with higher fidelity, not at smaller sizes. Stop thinking in terms of bitmap displays. I run at 1152x864 and have my min font size at 20. When at 1600x1200, I would set it to 24 or 26. The articles are very readable then.
Or do you prefer a slim column of size 8 fonts in the left 8% of your display? I don't, which is why I enforce things like minimum font sizes, and relative font size adjustments on the web.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Big websites aren't medium sized canteloupes.
Jakob Nielsen - the man who wants all sites on the internet to be written in HTML 3 or 4, with virtually no images. His article is extremely insightful - stating the blatantly obvious.
News flash Jakob - nobody is using 9.6 kbps modems anymore! Graphics can be aesthetically pleasing while making a site more 'useable' than text alone.
New standards and the rich content features of web languages have a reason and a purpose. Graphical browsers have been about for 9 years - isn't it time he used these features, and stopped telling others not to?
By the way, I could not validate his page: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://useit.com /alertbox/20030616.html
And he seems to have several CSS warnings: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=h ttp://useit.com/alertbox/20030616.html
These warnings stem from heuristics - rules of thumb are very common in the field of useability. These warnings attempt to avoid useability issues by ensuring the text colour is not the same as the background colour.
I choose not to live in the past.
When I started running I was having some serious pains. I started doing some research and decided that running barefoot might do me some good. It worked wonders and I ended up starting a blog to
(a) Document my beginnings as a runner, going from out of shape geek to slightly in shape geek over time.
(b) Allow other people to look at my experiences and learn from them when they start running.
(c) Allow other people to look at my experiences and learn from them when they start running *gasp* barefoot!
Will you find that info on about.com or running.com? Hell no, they have entire sections devoted to shoes and you rarely get to read a diary of someone who's just starting out. 95% of the info I find online is either a small site or something of the sort. Why? Because you can have all the professionally written pages on the net, but in the end the experiences of another person is always invaluable.
BTW, if anyone's interested here's my blog.
I should do something cool (or devious) with it, considering all the hits I get on it! :)
So Nielson has the #1 usability site by his reckoning. But what advertisers are targeting that niche? Maybe Addison-Wesley and certain trade shows. The size of the market should be something that makes sense to advertisers, customers, and suppliers.
A great deal of the web is about community involvement. If you look at towns across the US [e.g. Missoula, Mt], you will find hundreds of stores, artists and businesses with sites. Many of these sites get only a few hundred hits per year, but a lead from a local person hitting a local site is extremely valuable, making the small site profitable.
My wonderful site :-(
only gets about 600 to 800 page views a month.
and I suspect it tells businesses is that if I sell blueberry harvesting equipment which is unique to the field of blueberry farming, I don't need to nesecarily spend big bucks advertising on some big farming website when I can farm on a smaller cheaper more effectively.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
In particular, Nielsen is talking about teenage girls!!
After all, they're the busiest bloggers...
Are niches really big news? My site, the Videogame Music Archive has dominated its own niche: "game music" for years. Its a nice feeling to know that your site can be found at the nexus of two words of the english language on Google. :)
But on a more serious note, I think people need to get over the "get rich" and "fame" mentality and celebrate the topics they love.
Signal-to-noise rawoisethasetseoahitsoth
And I bet cutting back on the coffee didn't hurt either.
...you mean, like bragging about their hubrustic niche language google nexus quotient?
You know, if google goes down, all of whom you claim to be goes with it...how's that for a measure of self-worth.
> Considering that the Web as a whole will have about 4 trillion page views this year
... ooh, nice link .. *click*.
Most of which is caused by a single man! Nothing you couldn't do with a DSL line and
Attention Defecit Disorder
http://www.explodingdog.com/
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
/me what the hell is my nick? its interesting when people are a part of something large and have no grasp of how large it is... #hacking irc.undernet.org sid made me do it
Google just launched AdSense on Tuesday in fact. It's exactly designed to solve the problems you mention.
You can find Google AdSense here.
The article is actually about the distribution of traffic in different niches and how there is similar patterns in different niches. Although it may be tough for an individual to compete with Yahoo for the position of number 1 in the global portal market, it is still possible to make a splash in a niche market.
/. are interested in traffic patterns, the growth of the Internet. There was probably a naive /. editor who thought that the article would be a good topic of conversation.
/. editor who thought this might be an interesting topic of conversation nor the author of the article is even close to your level of intelligence. So they deserve to be insulted. I mean, the obvious is fodder for weak minds. True genius seeks out the counter intuitive, the obscure and the contradictory.
Hmmm, it is even possible for people to make a decent living by figuring out the needs of these different markets and developing sites that serve the markets. Ad values in niche markets are higher than the global market. Gosh, there are places in this great big internet of ours where an individual can have an impact.
The article suggests that both the niche and the most popular sites still have exponential growth curves--indicating that the media really isn't completely overrun by the three biggest sites as we find news articles hinting at. Instead there appears to be a layering of niche markets. This touches on important political debates about internet regulation.
Considering that a large number of people who frequent
Of course, neither the
The net is filled with these tiny minded people who actually work to build sites on truly mundane issues like corn growing in Iowa. BORING!!!!!
Let's ignore the fact that it is petty minds working on the obvious that grow the food we eat, and build houses we live in. It may be necessary to have a bunch of petty minds working on the obvious to make the internet work...but please, we don't need to hear any of this in our idle chit chat on slashdot. This forum should be about truly important questions such as the different smells that come from a priori, a posteriori and synthetic farts.
Is making money the only important thing?
The nice thing about the web is that you can publish things even when you don't care about making money. Try that with a physical book.
The cake is a pie
Call me cynical (or just go ahead and mod me down you little fucker), but does anyone else agree that this blog fad will eventually go the way of OS/2 ?
With every new blog related news topic I keep seeing this attitude like it's the holy grail of www. Christ it is just a form of online diary. Granted it has its place, but will it last? Soon it'll be information overload (if you can even call some of the crap I see on blogs information).
Almost since it's inception, my site has absolutely dominated the "sites about ucblockhead" niche.
The cake is a pie
I have a site about growing small potatoes!
Shame on you. Showing the IBM commercial without express written consent from big blue. Expect a one billion dollar lawsuit in the mail soon...I figure, the lawyers at IBM have to figure out some way to get the money to pay SCO.
This week's edition pretty much summarizes my thinking about blogs...
While you *can* repeatedly re-size your browser window for every site/page you view and you *can* make adjustments to font sizes, the end result can be unsatisfactory.
For one, there's the horizontal scrollbars. Reading a few paragraphs of text on a page that's full of large banners designed to fill the width of an entire screen is as pleasing as re-sizing a window to obscure huge ads. I know I don't want to be scrolling around when reading. Using vertical scrollbars when typing replies in a small frame isn't fun, either.
Then, there's the issue of line lengths that are a fixed length or don't wrap to accommodate the window size you've been mucking around with. If you choose not to re-size your window, you're back to scrolling horizontally.
There are a number of fairly standard typographical rules that define optimal line lengths. Newspapers use a reduced line length to accommodate the columnar presentation unique to that industry. Books and magazines also use an optimal line length. E-mail/usenet software works best with something like a 74-character line length.
Website designers, on the other hand, seem totally unaware of such considerations and design their pages to fill as much of the viewer's screen as they believe they can get away. In the event there's any real content provided (stuff worth reading), the viewer is forced to strain his or her eyes to navigate the length of a line that's most often 2-3 times what it should have been.
All of us have our own personal preferences, and depending on the size of the monitor we use, we choose to devote a certain amount of screen real-estate to a browser window. When you're past that, it's up to the developer to implement good design. The onus shouldn't be on the viewer.
The trouble is that if you make up your own word then try and get it onto google you will be there eventually. /. be even if i dont tell any of you what the word is??
:)
But it takes months and months of midlessly looking up on google to see if its listed you page yet. when that time could be better spent on minesweeper.
now how quick will the
Does anybody know how long it is ment to take for google to list a page?
where do you find a dog with no legs??
right where you left him.
sod it i want to see what happens anyway Babajuma
In case you are too young or didn't notice (while guzzling your Bud Lite and thumping your chest at what a totally unique and studly american you were) hundreds of small brewries emerged over the past couple decades in the USA. Many offered true to the spirit, even abiding by the German Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot), producing quality ales, stouts, lagers, etc. This, as anyone with a lick of sense could see, could lead to serious encroachment of Mega-Brew markets. So they did the american thing and bought a pile of them to hedge their bets and those small brewers who realised they could do fun things with a lot of money sold out.
I have the hunch the big web content sites are aware of how such a similar loss of page views to tiny, informative sites could be attractive. I know some have already sold out, even years ago. However, I also expect that some of these big sites could, and maybe are, running their own mini-sites, to capture that interest in focused, quality content and service. After all, who wants to wade through all the crap they have on their main pages? Not everyone, so why not be all stealthy and play both ends of the field, thus hedging their own bets.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And there are still some bugs - try resizing my reviews to a very narrow window in Mozilla, for example.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
I'd like to see a subweb-type topology taking place in my apartment building.
The other night I made way too much mashed potato and thought about how cool it would be to post a note about the availability of said food on some kind of chat room/intranet within the building for tenants only.
How about "Need Garlic Press" for example, or "Need WD40", just post it on the Wanted list, or better still take look through the inventory of what everbody has in their apartments and cross check this with the Calendar to see who is at home.
Maybe even let neighboring apartment buildings cross over into our space and vice versa.
(A) Read somewhere that website traffic follows a powerlaw.
(B) Repeat obvious and well-known properties of powerlaw distributions.
(C) Mention the word "weblog."
(D) Using powers gained in (A), (B), and (C), tell bloggers that they are important.
Repeat as necessary to raise traffic.
The dinky sites are the future, but only when a search engine can come up with a truly useful relevence engine.
It has not been developed as of yet. The best Google and others can do as of yet are cross-link relevance formulae, which can be manipulated.
Ironically, Google has taken a step backwards with the intent to filter blogs. Blogs are generally more relevant to the content they reference than 90% of the crap that comes up in search results.
/.ers have been tricked into helping to promote this guy's site to the top of his niche. After all, when it's linked to from such a huge site as /., google's pagerank system will automatically promote its listing in the search engine.
Twicked!
eTrade SUCKS
Congress put in some tax breaks for micro-breweries to stimulate their growth with some limit on the number of bottles per year, IIRC. This tax break became an incentive for the big beer boys to purchase these companies, taking advantage (IMHO unfairly) of the tax break through some whiz-bang-more-complicated-than-they-ought-to-be accounting practices.
Mmm, that 'micro brew' Sam Adams is brewed in the same vats at the big brands (though to be honest, I think it's just a lease of the vats, not an ownership arrangement).
"Small sites have two huge advantages over big sites: there are many more of them and they are more specialized and thus more targeted."
Therefore making the smaller sites the bigger sites, while the smaller sites have advantages over the bigger sites which aren't more targeted, therefore becoming smaller sites, which then become targeted and, and and?
I need a drink
Error 407 - No creative sig found
There are two ways to hit the top ranks in the search engines ... one is the way we've all been spammed about, with the hidden words, feeder pages, keyword cramming, etc. to make your web page "EXPLODE!!!!! with TRAFFIC!!!!" That is a desperation move for a me-too site selling the same products as 10,000 other sites who all fell for the same infomercial and became e-tailers.
And then there is the way Nielsen just revealed: find your niche, be the best in your niche, fill the pages with quality information about your specialized topic and don't worry about the big guys. You might only get 100 visitors a day, but they are exactly the visitors you wanted.
Something he hints at in other columns, but never states outright, something so obvious as to be ludicrous, but overlooked by herds of web designers ... HTML is a markup language for structure. And my tedious slogging through the research behind the indexing robots' algorithms shows that they use the structure to assign relevance whenever they detect it. If you have a well-structured document with well-chosen text, you can blow your competitors out of the top search engine listings.
Personally, I am glad to hear of web site designers who understand that the best person to decide upon the formatting of their site upon my screen is ME!.
www.eFax.com are spammers
When watching television, do you require the TV show to determine the optimal volume for you, or do you set it yourself? If you set the volume too high, do you blame the TV show?
I currently run a couple of free online games, http://www.coldfirestudios.com (*cheap plug*). I currently receive about 300,000,000 page views per year on a total of 3 games. That isn't too bad
I have been told that our Space and WWII game are some of the most detailed games of their genre, yet the games barely support themselves with the banner ads we place on the site
I suppose this is better than the fate of many other smaller web sites, but give me a break! Over the past 5 years, I have seen my competition come and go
Who ever came up with this idea that smaller web sites will dominate is on crack! It has been proven over and over that only web sites that utilize economies of scale can survive on the net these days
Mod this down (or even troll it), but this has been my experience
Advertisers (people that can still afford advertising) want to reach the masses, which means you need thousands (or millions) of unique visitors daily
Just my $0.02 cents
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Maybe you have one?
I recently started a weekly online comic strip in April and when I first launched the strip I ran an ad campaign (banner ads + Google ad words) to help drive some readers in. It worked, but only marginally. I was getting visitors but I had to pay for each one and, worst of all, my site had no real means of generating revenue.
;)
Thankfully, as it would turn out, someone who ran a Blog site stumbled across my comic not too long after it's debut and wrote a quick blurb about it on their site. Within days I found myself linked on about a dozen other Blogs and then the traffic started pouring in. It wasn't a huge amount of visitors, perhaps 3-5 thousand uniques total but it was ten times more than the advertising and a heck of a lot less expensive.
Had this not happened I would have never guessed the relevance of personal/blog sites. It only goes to show that word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful forms of advertising.
DigiSquid Design.
Why do you say they are filtering blogs? Did you know they recently bought Pyra, parent company of Blogger.com? They are well-aware of the value of blogs.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Summary: Jakob Nielsen's site has less text than some others, but he can still overwhelm the user with emphasized words. For each page users view, Nielsen delivers a different set of <strong> phrases to provide a distinctive-looking page.
We've known since 1997 that Nielsen's Alertbox site follows a roughly 10% ratio for random bold bits of text in the middle of a sentence. Simply stated, he tends to highlight large parts of the page, so much so that any real emphasis is lost.
The question is whether the same few phrases would always dominate, or whether the site would highlight different phrases in different pages. Studies now demonstrate that:
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Sure, a niche is a small thing, but there are many different niches. I think just about everything is a small niche, once you go byond the surface. News from Sweden isn't of interest to me, it is a niche that only Swedish, and a few others are interested in. (Which amounts to less than 10 million people if I remember right)
Personally I'm interested in metal foundry work, and I know and visit a number of niche sites. I'm also interested in "geek" topics, so I visit /. regularly, but that is a small niche compared to the number of people with web access. (much less in the world, which contains a lot of people that don't know english)
Nothing like a userContent.css local stylesheet to override broken preferences imposed by other sites. I see everything at the font point, face, and color of my choosing.
On the web, the reader vetos all display options.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
e cost-per-click (CPC) ads. This means that advertisers pay only when users click on ads. You'll receive a portion of the amount paid for clicks on AdWords ads on your website. Although we don't disclose the exact revenue share, our goal is to enable publishers to make as much or more than they could with other advertising networks
And they donÂt tell you what they pay, how much for a click. In googlestyle this is undisclosed.