It has been said: "Content is King." Back in 1996, that was the title of an essay -- by none other than Bill Gates -- that anticipates a decade's worth of changes in the way we use the Internet. These days, it's probably more accurate to say that content is a democracy: you can see it in sites like Wikipedia, which gives users the power to change content; and del.icio.us, which aggregates user trends. It's the same reason that -- a decade ago -- Alexa began compiling traffic stats. Popularity is queen, and she wants to be heard!
One of the sweeping changes that appears to be taking place today is a switch from editorial content to user-submitted, user-rated content. It turns out that in many cases, a group of users knows what they want better than the royals of yesteryear.
Ebaum's World
vs.
Albino Blacksheep
Something Awful
Newgrounds
Wired Magazine is running a story that mentions the on-going feud between several sites that are a great case in point. While these sites bicker over who stole whose traffic, they miss the bigger lesson -- that they are all losing to a new breed of site.
The graphs on the right are "reach" data collected by Alexa over the last year. The red dot is today and the gray bar is the standard deviation, which is where you expect most of the data points to fall. Each graph has its own scale and shows a site's trend relative to itself.
You can see that about six months ago, Ebaum's World and Albino Blacksheep started losing daily reach and Something Awful gained a small amount of reach. Both Something Awful and Newgrounds are within their standard deviation, indicating that they have fairly stable traffic bases. Something Awful did have a jump, which I suspect is due to a small portion of Ebaum's users trading horses. But that doesn't explain the general trend.
So I guess the question becomes: what happened the traffic early last year?
YouTube
Metacafe
The answer: The rise of user-submitted, user-rated media. These are represented by a new breed of sites like youtube and metacafe that completely bypass the cloistered editorial process in favor of open consumer-based systems.
You can see, for example, that YouTube and metacafe really started to take off at the beginning of this year. While metacafe seems to have stabilized, YouTube continues to gain reach. These graphs sharply contrast the others.
So what's the moral of the story? Users know what they like: let them tell you!
Comments - Permalink
One of the sweeping changes that appears to be taking place today is a switch from editorial content to user-submitted, user-rated content. It turns out that in many cases, a group of users knows what they want better than the royals of yesteryear.
Ebaum's World
vs.
Albino Blacksheep
Something Awful
Newgrounds
Wired Magazine is running a story that mentions the on-going feud between several sites that are a great case in point. While these sites bicker over who stole whose traffic, they miss the bigger lesson -- that they are all losing to a new breed of site.
The graphs on the right are "reach" data collected by Alexa over the last year. The red dot is today and the gray bar is the standard deviation, which is where you expect most of the data points to fall. Each graph has its own scale and shows a site's trend relative to itself.
You can see that about six months ago, Ebaum's World and Albino Blacksheep started losing daily reach and Something Awful gained a small amount of reach. Both Something Awful and Newgrounds are within their standard deviation, indicating that they have fairly stable traffic bases. Something Awful did have a jump, which I suspect is due to a small portion of Ebaum's users trading horses. But that doesn't explain the general trend.
So I guess the question becomes: what happened the traffic early last year?
YouTube
Metacafe
The answer: The rise of user-submitted, user-rated media. These are represented by a new breed of sites like youtube and metacafe that completely bypass the cloistered editorial process in favor of open consumer-based systems.
You can see, for example, that YouTube and metacafe really started to take off at the beginning of this year. While metacafe seems to have stabilized, YouTube continues to gain reach. These graphs sharply contrast the others.
So what's the moral of the story? Users know what they like: let them tell you!
Comments - Permalink
