NYU Professor Clay Shirky has this potentially groundbreaking piece in Wired magazine this month which gives a name to the phenomenon of narrowly targeted web sites that nonetheless attract vast numbers of visitors. He calls these sites, which generate at least one million visitors per month, “meganiches,” a contradiction in terms that seems so apt in describing all the tens of thousands of web sites that fill unmet, and sometimes incomprehensible, needs.
Some of these special interest sites can reach as many people as a major metropolitan newspaper’s print circulation. With more than one billion people online globally, a tiny sliver of web traffic can translate into very big numbers.
Now that more than a billion people have access to the Web, there is no longer a trade-off between size and specificity. The basic math is simple: A tiny piece of an immense pie is huge. A decade ago, reaching one-tenth of 1 percent of Web users amounted to 36,000 people, a number that compared favorably with the circulation of, say, the daily newspaper in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Back then, reaching a million users required a decidedly mainstream offering (Amazon.com and MSN come to mind). Now, getting niche can be the path to getting big; one-tenth of 1 percent of today’s Web audience is a million people. Forget Bridgewater — the Net is chockablock with special-interest sites and services you’ve never heard of but whose user base exceeds the print circulation of The Washington Post.
He offers as an example an obscure web site called Gaia Online, which targets anime fans, but in a very specific way, allowing users to upload their own drawings and functioning as a cross “between a bulletin board and a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.” As Shirky points out, Gaia is not for everybody.
Anime role-playing and tutorials on how to sketch girls with really big eyes don’t hold much interest for, oh, 99.9 percent of the Web’s population.
But, Gaia has a lot of fans — the site has more than four million registered users and generates traffic levels on par with RollingStone.com and MaximOnline.com.
Then there are the inexplicably popular sites, such as YTMND.com, which started as a single page riffing on a line from the movie “Finding Forrester” (when Sean Connery says “You’re the man now, dog”) into a meganiche that draws millions of visitors per month.
YTMND.com now hosts thousands of user-created Web pages, known as YTMNDs, that combine a background image, a sound clip, and rudimentary animation. The effect is often comic but frequently inexplicable, the ultimate inside joke. You might not think an animated hand drawing breasts on a comic-book heroine to a snippet of A-Ha’s “Take On Me” is much of a knee slapper, but a surprising number of people can’t get enough - which, of course, is the very definition of a meganiche.
YTMND.com gets millions of unique visitors a month, more than 100,000 of whom have contributed YTMNDs. Supported entirely by Google ads, Goldberg does all the system administration but mainly tries to stay out of the way. “The site sort of runs itself,” he says. His success illustrates an unexpected dimension of the meganiche’s power: What begins as an isolated sarcastic gesture can become the world’s biggest inside joke.
Meganiche sites can generate decent ad revenue for their creators, with the costs to develop and run the sites minimal. But, Shirky warns that the rise of meganiches may already be over because the influx of ad revenues is changing the competitive landscape, attracting big companies (think News Corp.’s purchase of MySpace) looking to actually design meganiches, which, to date, have arisen almost by happenstance. Plus, the hypergrowth of the Internet is over — with a billion users already online, growth will slow.
I’m not sure I agree with Shirky on this last point. With nothing but imagination limiting web site creators and given the open nature of the Internet, it’s still conceivable, and probably likely, that hordes of new sites will come (and go) that are capable of attracting and sustaining, for some period of time, millions of visitors.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:36 AM|Comments(0)
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