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Starbucks

If you gave me one month, I could show you how to triple your traffic. No, this isn’t a sales pitch or the intro to a twelve step program, it’s a point of fact. In one month I could show you how to become a successful content producer, not a weblebrity mind you but orders of magnitude more exposed than you are today. Give me one month and I could put you on the road to making all your Internet dreams come true, and you know what, I’d do it for free.

Well, let’s back up for a second, it wouldn’t be completely free. There is one teeny, tiny catch to my offer — a small price, a little something for my trouble. For all this help, I am going to have to ask you to give over the keys to your site.


Secret Revealed

If you have decent marketing skills and understand the game you are playing, anyone can drive traffic. It’s not black magic, it’s just a matter of producing content that the Internet thinks is interesting. Many of us even have an intuition for what that content is, so why do we think it’s so difficult?

It’s because we are trying to shoe horn mass appeal into niche content. It’s because we forget that mainstream appeal means appealing to the mainstream.

The mainstream could care less about the ins and outs of Cuil or the latest bitchmeme. The mainstream doesn’t know Julia Allison from a hole in the wall, is only vaugely aware of Digg (they heard about it once on CNN) and still gets most of their technology news from the Discovery Channel.

Unless you are blogging about Obama, following the Jonas Brother’s latest tour via web cam or running your own Fantasy Football league, you will never win the minds and hearts of a mainstream audience with the content you really want to create.

Frankly, if you want to get hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, write a decent celebrity gossip blog. Don’t believe me? Ask a dozen people (outside of the Valley) whether they recognize Perez Hilton or Mike Arrington and you’ll see what I mean.

If you want to write on the topics that interest you, accept the fact that you will always face a hard limit on how quickly you are going to be able to grow, especially if you are writing about technology. Writing about technology on the web is like building a Starbucks in Manhattan — it seems like a great idea until you look across the street.

Let’s change gears.

You wonder why 95% of web applications fail to translate into broad markets — it’s a similar principle, but this time it’s more like putting down the foundation for your Starbucks in 1947. There is nothing wrong with the product per say, everyone loves coffee, but the market for the $5 Decaf, Venti Latte just isn’t there for the post-war crowd.

That’s why I find the debate over the business model for the Social Web to be so intriguing. The reason that people are finding it so difficult to monetize these products has nothing to do with whether they are good, it has everything to do with the fact that it’s really hard to get normal people to pay for a product when the need doesn’t yet exist for them. No one needs Twitter or Plurk or Friendfeed, I love them to death but if they all disappeared I’d be none the worse for wear. Even if you manage to get into the wallets of every early adopter (a notoriously difficult task), there just aren’t enough of us to matter and unfortunately our numbers don’t scale quickly enough to follow a product’s growth curve.

All of this mainstream appeal that we chat about here in the techosphere is a carnival act we put on for ourselves. The companies that have managed to make the largest profits on the web, aren’t non-contextual social conversation tools. The ones bringing in profits have found ways to tap into the needs of the mainstream — Amazon, Google, eBay, Craigslist et al. Few of the cool widgets that we salivate over solve the concrete problems that these services did. None of them, as far as I am concerned, do so for a broad sector of the market.

So where does that leave us?

If you want to know where the business model for the Social Web lives, it’s in the head of whoever uses these tools to solve a substantive problem. The person who gets people to buy into social technology the way they are buying into GPS and mobile-tech. The person who builds something that solves a problem that wasn’t created by the web itself. This is a good acid test because if you’re solving a problem that the Internet didn’t heap on us — you can be pretty sure that the mainstream will catch wind. The person who manages this will likely be the first, real “Web 2.0″ success story.

What should we do while we’re waiting? I don’t know, we could probably use another Google-killer.

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