Digging through Wired: Meganiches

I dug through my big pile of back issues of Wired (hey, between the holidays and vacation, it was hard to gt to them all). It was time well-spent as I ran across a number of interesting engagism-related articles. I'll highlight a few in the next few posts.

In the November edition there was a great overview of the "Meganiche" phenomenon. This describes the idea that with a billion people online, even the most targetted sites can grab the attention of a hige number of people (often over a million). The examples in the article point to the increasing desire of users to interact with others and to provide their own content. For example, Gaia Online exists for anime fans that want to get creative -- it's not just about watching anime, it's about what users can create. Or consider YTMND, short for "You're The Man Now Dog," which allows users to combine video, audio and text to make some point -- sometime funny, often odd. The main lesson the article makes is that with so many people online, all with different interests, it is possible to have limitless "niche sites" serving hundreds of thousands if not millions of souls who share the same strange interest.

It seems to me that a side lesson (or from my perspecitve the most important lesson) is that these sites experience success only when they allow users to truly engage in the developing content and sharing with others. In other words, it's not enough to just identify a weird obsession that people have and put up a site about it. In fact, a site serving a meganiche is useful to its visitors only if it allows them to engage fully in whatever it is they're passionate about. In some ways, that's why the meganiche sites that rise organically, i.e., from real people that feel strongly about a certain topic, tend to be among the most successful.