Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

We'll look here more on the impact of sites build for scale versus those built for niche categories.

The reason these types of websites built for scale will level off, and eventually drop in visitors, is because once the general content is interacted with, there isn't anywhere else for someone to go to get deeper into the subject. That's why niche businesses are the greatest opportunities for online marketers to get into. It takes a lot to compete in a space where you're trying to build up scale. And scale can only go so far before nobody else is coming to the party.

Take the nightly news in America. Those who watch it are pretty much at the levels they'll reach. It isn't going to grow in any way. So about all that can happen is the networks try to draw from the existing pool of people that watch the nightly news. The market isn't going to grow, only people possibly changing networks. The only exceptions will be stories of interest that drive high viewership for a short period of time. Once the story ends, the viewership drops back to what it always is.

Because Facebook is much smaller than MySpace, they will obviously grow at a much faster pace. Once they reach scale, they'll go through the same thing MySpace does. When they do, people will start writing about the story of users leaving Facebook and going to whatever the general site of that time will be.

Here's the secret behind all this for online marketers: If any of these types of sites go niche, they will alienate those who have no interest in that area, then they're no longer a site that could retain scale. If they don't go niche, eventually young people will make up their minds about things they're specifically interested in, and go to those places that can take them deeper into those interests. You can't be all things to all people!.

The reason sites with scale can be all things to all people, is because they only provide a cursory look at any one subject. Even if they have a lot of content, those providing the content usually write with general knowledge alone. Experiment and you'll see. Go to these sites and look into what's really important to you. You'll find that they could never provide the indepth coverage of the topic you have an interest in if they're large community sites or portals.