Yesterday, this site was only available to those using RSS for a good part of the day. When users clicked on the AccMan URL, all they saw was a 'your site is being populated' notice from my hosting provider. I received one message about this from someone who wanted to visit the site directly.
This is interesting at several levels:
- The last few weeks, direct site traffic has been steadily declining. Under most circumstances this would be something over which to panic. I'm not.
- RSS traffic has doubled with a net increase of around 30% in subscribed readership suggesting to me some switching behaviour. One firm of CAs I met recently uses RSS extensively. That's a new direction.
- Despite the outage, RSS traffic was unaffected - no surprise there.
- Robert Scoble has said that he rarely goes direct to a site these days (except to post comments) but instead accesses via RSS. I do the same.
- Sites like TechCrunch still attract a lot of direct traffic but then that's necessary to support the ad-based model upon which TC is based.
- TechMeme provides direct links to sites rather than individual RSS feeds so I guess there is a presumed utility in accessing a person's site from an aggregation provider.
What are the implications?
- Does this mean that the time and effort put into re-designing AccMan was wasted? Apparently not. A number of commenters congratulated me on the latest effort and plenty of people turn up. I'm more concerned with the trend.
- Does it mean that more people are grazing rather than consuming from AccMan? Hard to tell. There is a steady flow of comments but that is dependent on people turning up rather than accessing via RSS
- Much is made of advertising supported media but in an RSS enabled world where commenting is not catered for, that must mean a reliance on commenting visitors. That in turn must also require content designed to provoke a reaction.
- I've long argued that participation in social networks (of which websites are a part) follow the 1/9/90 rule where 1% are active, 9% are sort of active and 90% are pure consumers or lurkers. Therefore, advertising can only realistically provide a sensible return to very high traffic sites or aggregation community sites. This debunks the myth of long tail value going back to the individual content creator. However, it creates a genuine issue about rewarding the lone content provider who delivers value but does not generate the sort of traffic that would attract the ad networks.
- There is still a place for the specialist website/blog as evidenced by the continuing interest in sites like this. However, direct monetization that reflects content value is probably a pipe dream unless supported through sponsorship of one sort or another. However, those sites geared towards providing content related to high value goods and services should fare better than those that are consumer led because the relative value of a hit is much higher.
What about professionals?
- Many professionals have complained that their web presence doesn't deliver the goodies they thought they would. It may be that even with great content, that problem remains. However, sites that do tell great stories will still attract attention and if that delivers mind share then you can argue it has done its job as a marketing tool. Even if access is normally via RSS.
- Community based content will become much more important as a traffic driver. This means that professionals will have to engage for them to be profiled as thought leaders and contributors.
- Traditional media advertising will change. Mike Prosceno has an interesting post on this, suggesting that advertising will flow back to consumers. In the professional case, to those who are directly addressing professional community issues. (Hint: I'm on just such a project)
Photo shows core users driving SDN. From a total of 950K users, <60 are the hardcore.
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