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.)

Comments

"tiny sites"?

[SHEENmaster]

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.

Re:Here's why small works

[Creepy Crawler]

>>>>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.

Very true. Most small sites arent as 'professional' looking, but more information can be found on them than most any corporate sites. Corporates will lie to sell their own shit, or have stockholders to cater to, while a simple site will have 1 person do the whole thing. They'll control content and most of the time, enjoy it in the process.

>>>>>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.

I've found a few of my own sites like that. remix.overclocked.org just shows that community non-profit driven website for the fun it is. And prsonally, there's a few remixers (of game music) that would be damned hard to distinguish from real (check out Russel Cox - beautiful stuff he does).

>>>>>>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.

Kinda funny how the net's doing a full cycle on the web. I remembered the old altavista.digital.com for what it originally was: links to sites people found interestng. Only then did it start to implement a search engine, and a rudimentary one at that. And as time went on, they thought they could make it more "corporate". By the time they turned the text-only cookie off, I was at google.

The web was never about e-commerce, corporate web sites, or any of the filler. It was a way you could have your own piece of the way the world was. You could put out what you thought and say, and let others contact you through email. Or course then, you actually connected to their email server and use it.

In a way, it's been changed back to the beginning.

Re:oh great

[blincoln]

You have to have a niche to play to.

Back in the mid-90s, I had a website with a low hitcount too. It stayed low because I didn't have much that people were after. Now I run a niche site for fans of the deleted bits from the Legacy of Kain series, and I'm up to 659906 total page requests (11865510 total requests) and 73435 distinct hosts served since October.

I don't post the link here because I don't need the excess casual traffic - I'm already close to my bandwidth limit for this month.

Haven't thought about that before.

[Mmm coffee]

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.

Within their niche they dominate

[rifftide]

This reminds me of Jack Welch's directive in the 1980's that every division at GE had to be #1 or #2 in its market, or risk being shutdown or sold off. What happened was predictable: GE's managers redefined their markets, so that instead of being in "home appliances" they were in a collection of smaller markets including "space-efficient microwave ovens", etc.

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.

Yes, the obvious is too dull of a topic!!!!

[yintercept]

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.

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 /. 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.

Of course, neither the /. 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.

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.

Re:Yes, the obvious is too dull of a topic!!!!

[davebarz]

Look, I am very interested in traffic patterns and the growth of the internet. I do web design and hosting. And I read the entire article before posting, expecting to find something insightful, an interesting deduction based on what the author was saying, something of the like. But I found that the entire article consisted of obvious observations that anyone who has used the internet for any length of time (most /.ers fall into this category) would have made on their own. So, perhaps this article would indeed appeal to a niche market, but do I not have a right to declare that I am not in that market?

Re:Yes, the obvious is too dull of a topic!!!!

[yintercept]

I agree, the article wasn't well written. I was disappointed by the lack of depth, and I thought the author was a bit full of himself.

The topic, however, is extremely interesting. I find the distribution of web traffic to be fascinating topic. While Wall Street concentrates on just the biggest sites, IMHO, the real meat of the net is all the small independent sites, and the interaction between these sites.

I've actually spent a fair amount of time trying to help to build awareness of independent web sites in small towns, and trying to help towns build a topology of links that can attract more traffic into their independent niches. Although the article was poorly written, it starts to address the important issue that small sites need to know: They need to know how to identify their niche and to understand the flow of traffic in their niche.

IMHO, the topology of the independent web is much more interesting that the Media Metrix 50. Figuring out how to define and build these markets is a major challenge. I wish the article went further in that direction.

I was snippy in my post because the study of traffic begins with the obvious. Webmasters get their biggest jumps in traffic by answering obvious questions like: who is my audience? Who are my competitors? How is the traffic distributed among my competitors? What are the keywords that attract my audience?

I read the entire article before posting, expecting to find something insightful, an interesting deduction based on what the author was saying, something of the like.

The fault of the article was that it didn't present its ideas very clearly...not that it dwelt the obvious. Personally, I think the introduction of terms is more important than wrapping up with a conclusion...the net seems to change too fast for conclusions.

The article made interesting allusions to the patterns of traffic in large markets being similar to small markets. It is an obvious way to state things, but a worthwhile observation.

Re:They dominate...

[Jerf]

They dominate... and make no money.... almost no small sites make any money....

Have you ever noticed that he rarely points to sites outside of useit.com and he often is selling his usability reports?

And you aren't the slightest bit interested in the opinions of a person who is running one of the "small sites" and is in all probability making money with it? Think he might just understand a bit?

It sounds to me like you wouldn't be happy no matter what.

Incidentally, figuring out the "blame" for the failure of micropayments is a non-trivial operation; the multi-year stagnation in the browser market (thanks to Netscape's effective disappearence and Microsoft's well-known tendency to not bother with its precious "innovation" unless there's competition) at the same time that the routing market has held a virtual monopoly (ensuring no protocol-level support for micropayments could make any headway), both market conditions and not truly technological conditions, probably had a lot to do with. Despite the fact I'm not holding my breath, they would still solve an awful lot of problems.

Re:oh great

[Suppafly]

Great. My counter's currently on 2137, and that's after a year. I'm off to hang myself.

People tend to avoid free hosts like geocities because the content is generally poor, and there are usually annoying popups and ads.. get better hosting and have some content, you'll get that many hits a month.

Re:Here's why small works

[cenobita]

Actually, that's not really too accurate to say.

I used to use IRC, AIM, etc. a lot, but then I discovered that most people pretty much suck and chatting is little more than a worthless timesink for bored people.

I'm only somewhat joking.

The net is a resource for information. Mind that i'm not making a specific definition of *how* we receive that information; "people speaking to people directly" is a pretty limited context when you take into account the dozens of other ways that we're able to (and do) gather and process information on the net. You can't simply reduce it to one giant fucking chatroom, because ideally, it's not, nor should it be.

AdSense

[danny]

Try out Google's new AdSense program. They accepted my site, with under 200 000 page views a month, and they target ads specifically for individual pages, selling them to their large AdWords customer base.

Danny.

Small sites dominate .... my a$$!!

[mustangdavis]

'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.'

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 ..... but it definately isn't a "large" site ....


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 ...

... which leads me to this question: HOW IS THIS DOMINATING?????

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 .... but no one is "dominating" ... they are surviving!!!


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 ... because most advertisers want CHEAP advertising that MANY people will see over and over .... you don't get either of those with targeted advertising on small web sites!!!


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 ...

It's true, Blogs work.

[Angerson]

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.