Small Social Sites Work Together To Tackle Facebook
Posted on: Wednesday, 29 July 2009, 05:55 CDT
Several small social sites are starting to wonder how to be successful when they have to compete against juggernauts like Facebook. They might try to create a different path by becoming a specialty website for a certain fan base that advertisers will target.
This will not be simple, as Facebook continues to grow, but small social and media sites seem to be establishing their footing and getting bigger quickly.
Ning.com lets users create their own social networks, while sites Sodahead and Fanpop have had triple-digit increases in traffic in a short period of time.
"There will always be a place for niche sites that have a focus, whether the focus is gaming, or a regional focus, or a functional focus like Twitter, or a vertical or demographic focus," Gartner analyst Ray Valdes said to Reuters News.
Facebook's growing popularity with older users might be turning off teen and college users, said Chuck Schilling, a director at Nielsen Online.
"The original people who were on Facebook -- those of college age -- are becoming a bit disenchanted and will soon find their own outlets, now that their parents are coming to Facebook in droves," Schilling said.
"People are branching out from the popular sites. They are exploring," he added. "There's a lot of room in the game."
Advertisers are finding prospects in smaller sites.
"The promise of niche social networks and social networking applications is a more targeted audience around a specific interest that will be extremely attractive to advertisers seeking relevant content and conversations against which to place their ads," IDC analyst Caroline Dangson said.
Obviously, the distance between the huge social network and everyone else is vast.
Facebook racked 77 million users in June. Only a few social sites had 10 million users, comScore statistics shows.
However, there are a few growing sites with 2 million to 10 million users, like Ning, Sodahead, Fanpop and Funadvice.
"The fact that this is such a growing space overall does enable other players in the space to ride the coattails of some of these bigger sites," comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman said.
Going up against Facebook is not fun, as creators of applications that invite users, like games, go to the largest sites.
Several second-tier social sites have created a group to tackle the problem. OpenSocial's members are Yahoo, Hi5, MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn.
Advertisers flock to the larger sites. So several startups have decided to become an application site instead of building one.
Application maker Slide had 32 million users in June, while Rock You had 26 million.
"In order to build a destination site, there are more challenges to gain that audience," Lipsman said. "So it's an increasingly viable business model to build an application that can reside or build off the infrastructure of other sites."
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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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