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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.
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
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
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.
- 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.
"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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Now too bad there wasn't someway of getting masses of people to contribute their experiences in a organized, topical manner that would make it easier to index catalog. Oh, wait, thee is - it's called USENET.
I really don't understand what a blog does, aside from look pretty, that usenet (and a search engine) can't do better. Perhaps it boils down to a more effecient, existing, infrastructure vrs complex ego stroking hit/log analysis.
Not that I'm questioning the great value the those, such as yourself, have invested with such content creation, I just wonder why we seem to feel that 'blogs' are a bright shiny new tool ever so much better at this stuff than anything pre-exisiting.
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
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
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.
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.
You are obviously overlooking the obvious observation ... Nielsen doesn't write for experienced designers whose sites are perfection in pixels, he writes for the clueless and confused who want to make their sites better, and in the process gives designers cluesticks to whack PHBs with. That article is a powerful weapon for a designer trying to talk a client or PHB out of creating a Swiss-Army-knife website when the company just needs a 3/32 hex driver.
Our site, www.goofball.com (shamless plug too), was doing close to a million pageviews per day in 1999. All the content was free and given that it has always represented the largest database archive of funny/filthy/crazy videos (and anything else funny), people loved coming in and grabbing it for free - much like they probably do your games. We got paid CPM advertising rates, so we were able to cover our huge hosting/bandwidth costs.
Times changed and we had to switch to a different model - membership fees. Yes, our traffic is now a quarter of what is once was, but so are our hosting costs and we're still in the black. Not dominating for sure - but slightly profitable (or even just breaking even) is far better than what we've seen with some larger sites (massively in debt / shutting down).
I guess the point is to keep your site alive, particularly since you're obviously passionate about the subject matter. Maybe offering a preview version of the games for free and having people pay for a more full version might be one idea you could try? I do not mean to oversimplify your situation of course ...
The full story is here if anyone is interested ...