Thursday, January 18, 2007

A test of mass micro-media and going ultra niche

First, my apologies for not keeping up with the blog for a few days. It's been a very busy time and one reason (one of many!) for this is the launch of www.mgbclub.com
I'd appreciate it if you took a look and shared your comments below.
Perhaps first I should explain the idea behind it. This is the first site of a series I will be able to churn out now that I've had the template developed. It's intended to test whether or not a mass media company such as the one I work for can deliver a community-driven mass micro-media play.
Each of these sites run entirely on user generated content (blogs) and are funded by google adsense.
The ads are targeting extremely effectively, which means they are not only simple and cheap to implement, they are also about as close as it gets to advert-as-content. The more relevant content that gets added the more effective (read, engaging) they will be.
The sites can be launched extremely quickly and cheaply which means we only need quite small audiences world-wide to succeed.
Because we have strong brands in the markets we're launching these into, we have ways in which we can seed these sites and drive traffic to them - critical because exponential growth of the kind illustrated in Reed's Law (see group forming network theory under resources, left navigation), can't start from zero!

Why don't I just use blogger (or similar) and buy a handful of urls? Because blogs are just blogs. These sites allow every member of their community to blog together, not simply comment on one person's blog. And we get full control over how they work.

Having said all that, my fingers remain tightly crossed.... particularly as I've just discovered some of the tabs don't appear if you view on IE7 - er so just the 25% of the traffic so far... and rising.

Lesson for everyone: Test your new launches on microsoft's latest. (cough, shuffle, shuffle...)
I promise we'll get that little bug fixed asap...

1 comment:

  1. What are the longer term plans?

    Are there plans for additional functionality in the future, and how will each site be moderated etc? Will you be using community members to run the sites, or will they be kept in house?

    ReplyDelete

FasterFuture.blogspot.com

The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?