When it comes to social media websites, the long tail theory breaks down a bit.
We'd expect, in a standard long tail curve, that the pink area represented more demand and value overall than the blue area. However, the reverse is overwhelmingly the case. There are dozens of lists of Digg clones, Flickr-like image sharing applications, social bookmarking sites, etc. but even if you were to have a dominant presence on all of these, the traffic and mindshare you'd earn would be nowhere close to that of having one listing on the del.icio.us/popular page or the front page of Digg. Why?
- Social sites have an inherent network effect - the more participants there are, the better the service functions. Thus, joining an unpopular site is of far less benefit to a user than joining a popular site.
- Social media in general has yet to reach a level of popularity where fragmentation and demand is spread out. It would be akin to saying that in 1930, there was great demand for more broadcast television channels - not only had most folks not heard of the medium, many didn't even know why they might want one
- Fragmentation and niche demand is already built into the medium - you can sort by what your interests, tags, categories, etc. in many of the major services.
Obviously, sites like Sphinn, Bluedot, Menéame and others would suggest that it's possible to break into the market, but your product has to be unique, targeted and have the expectation of popularity at the outset. Sphinn's an excellent example of a site that everyone in the search marketing world is reading, because they expect that everyone else in the industry is also paying attention (and, thus, don't want to be left out).
Whenever I see a list like this one - 50+ Social Bookmarking Sites - I'm fairly certain that maybe 5-10 of those will have any long-term shot at success. To my mind, it's simply not a market where the long tail will allow hundreds or thousands of companies to prosper.
p.s. In related news, John Andrews wants to bump the SEOmoz post off the top of the most Sphunn page. Sounds good to me! Sphinn it here.
I totally agree.
I think it all comes down to choosing the best social media networks for you and what you're looking to promote. Just because one is smaller, doesn't necessarily mean it can't be benefitial. If it's targetting the audience you want then, in my opinion, it would be well worth your while to spend time there.
Bigger sites like Digg definitely have the advantage of reaching more ppl, but sometimes bigger isn't better if no body's interested. Good post though!
I agree, and in that sense, social media sites are similar to the long tail. Fewer visitors from smaller sites (just like less traffic from obscure searches), but more interested ones.
I'm not sure the lesser-known social media sites are analogous here. The long tail involves a combination of lower numbers of searches, lower competition, and increased specificity, and there's nothing about a smaller social media site that implies that the subjects discussed and linked to from there are going to be more specific to a given site.
When you get into sites like Sphinn, however, that's different, but not because it's small. What matters is that Sphinn is designed around a specific niche. Because you know the community and the subjects that interest them, it's easier to get their attention.
I think there is a social media long tail in the form of niche social sites.
A social media site on health for example would probably do really well (not near as good as Digg). Social sites in different niches are the long tail in my opinion.
I agree with you in terms of numbers of users - but if the 100 people that visit CraniumCastle.com each day are all in your target audience, then getting that exposure could be more beneficial than being seen by thousands of uninterested Digg users.
I agree. Getting sphinned for search blogs or ballhyped for sports websites could be better in terms of quality of users.
Rand I've noticed the same short tail effect for Digg and del.icio.us in particlar. The reasons you sited are good but I have to add a couple more:
Limited Search Functionality - Let's face it, the SE at Digg strait up sucks. Users can't put in long tail search terms and expect good results so they have been trained to keep it simple (ie. short and broad).
Keyword-based Search - Where SB sites do a good job with search is keyword matching though not for words in the page so much as words used to tag the page. Welcome to tag stuffing 2.0 but where it used to be your meta's it is now the words used to bookmark your pages on your favorite SB sites.
@EGOL - Huh?
Welcome to tag stuffing 2.0 but where it used to be your meta's it is now the words used to tag social bookmarking sites.
Amen brother. Just wait until the web 2.0 version of webpositition gold shows up and allows users to mass submit to every available social website.
The Long Tail is basically a measurement of distribution, that's why it's effective (and measurable) on sites with large amounts of traffic (Google, Amazon, Netflix).
Once you get into the low traffic social media sites, they're going to have the same popularity curves as the bigger ones, but their tail is going to be cut short as their users quickly run dry.
Like others have mentioned though, and Rand alludes to with the 1930s/Broadcast Television analogy, eventually social sites built around niche interest could become like the cable options of today and drive at least self-sustaining amounts of traffic. Puppy Channel anyone?
That is a strong point. Right now demand isn’t high but there are many people entering the space for one very important reason. In 1930 there were few competitors in the space and now television is the single largest media space in number of users. The longtail of social media is like putting a little bit of money into whoever owns transmission channels. Not every channel struck it rich but the most valuable today (Turner Broadcasting) didn’t even exist until the 70’s. The barrier to entry is low now and when these channels do break the mainstream even smaller providers get a boost from the larger providers being bought by Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Flickr, Blogger, etc. all drew attention to a medium and opened opportunities for competitors to thrive. Being part of these communities now provide a solid footing as the mainstream approaches the channel.
“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.†— Warren Buffet
Couldn't agree more. In fact, I don't think companies can pull these niche sites off nowadays. Look what happened with the daily radar sites produced by Future US. Got bloated, tried to do too much, and the sites paid the price last month when they were killed. For these niche sites to survive in this day of age, they need to be developed by a small group or people, who are passionate about the subject, are going to stick with it, and can rally a community around it. It's all about community, and loving what you do in my eyes. We're trying this over at BallHyped, a niche vote-up site dedicated to sports and hyping the best sports stories and blogs of the day. Is the web too saturated for the site to gain traction, maybe. But we're also passionate about the subject, and it's a fun project either way. We'll see how it all pans out.
Rand,
I think you're looking at this the wrong way.
The long tail was a consumption effect the basis of which as you know was the netflix, amazon scenaro of movie and book purchases (and this is important) within a vertical. I think the social sites as a whole are too broad in subject and the metric of traffic too dependant on outside factors (author, authority, topic, etc.) for this analysis to have value.
A more interesting and applicable approach I think (especially from an SEO perspective would be to look at the number of links or to SEOmoz from the social sites (including blogs) at the domain level and see what that distribution looks like.
Or, maybe better, look at a vertical (SEO) and look at traffic from SEW, SEL, SER, WMW as well as the rest of the blogoshpere.
The network effect - whereby the value of a network is proportion to the square of the number of members, rather than simply the number of members - is a powerful thing. It's the same reason there is (roughly) one telephone interopability standard. Now everyone has a phone, the only useful phones are those that talk to the others.
If everyone's on digg, the place to join is digg.
This holds true if the value of social media is actually the network bit - in the case of digg, if you actually want news, there is a cap on how much more useful it gets as new people join. The 'wisdom' (and I use the phrase loosely) of 1,000 people is comparable to the wisdom of 10,000 people (or at least isn't 10 or 100 times less).
I think the largest social media sites will effectively stop being 'social' (for many users) and become simply media, leaving room for another site to be as large as digg is now (when the mainstream wakes up to social media and your average Joe uses it).
I am can feel that you are trying to promote Sphinn just like problogger did with Chitika when it once started.
Sphinn is good but i have seen every after 1-2 weeks a post regarding Sphinn isnt good looking are you running out of topics? or nothing happening in the industry.
Well, articles about Digg are also dugg often so I think it is natural the articles about Sphinn will be Sphinned.
The problem that I see is that there is a spectrum of variants between blogs and social media sites. Where do you draw the line? It's blurry. If you define narrowly then the long tail does not hold but if you define broadly then it does.
I am interested in hearing your thoughts in more detail.
Especially about how the line between blog and social media site affects assessment of the long tail effect.
This topic is one of the most important to try to wrestle to the ground, although it's very challenging.If you want to get to a social media site that is "successful", then inevitably it will have too many topics being raised for you to be reasonably sure that you get to all the quality items.
Being 'Hot' will often be a function of the author of the item so it may not include some really memorable items. Voting is one way to try to get some measure of value although few seem to be willing to vote.
Perhaps another would be to have everyone having the right to nominate 'My Favorite', which would be an item other than their own items. Provided this was a key part of the social media makeup then counting the 'My Favorite' choices would be a better measure of what some folk think is important. Your 'My Favorite' choice should automatically die after 7 days with a reminder to choose a new (or the same) 'My Favorite'.