A niche social network for people recovering from addiction, called SoberCircle, hit Del.icio.us popular this morning and it made me think - "my goodness, the market for niche social networks must be nearly infinite." SoberCircle has never been profiled on any of the top web 2.0 blogs and we haven't received any press releases announcing their support for OpenSocial - but the site is yet another social network that made a mark on the web today.
Most people who follow new developments in web applications closely contend that MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn are so dominant, and their tiny challengers so numerous, that launching Yet Another Social Network is among the most foolish things an entrepreneur today can do. I disagree.
What is a social network? Typically, it's just a website that offers users a profile page, the ability to publish to the web, to add other users as friends and to send user-to-user messages, or sitemail. That's simple but powerful stuff; it's functionality that countless real-world organizations will benefit from in the coming years as turnkey solutions become increasingly visible.
Here's my 6 reasons why I believe that SoberCircle and many of the other seemingly random, obscure niche social networks online are in fact viable businesses in a huge, untapped market.
The sheer number of people online already and coming online every day cannot be ignored. Many niche content sites, from sites about street drag racing to obscure medical conditions to drag racing while suffering from obscure medical conditions, that already receive traffic on more than monetizable levels. I talk to companies regularly that see substantial traffic to sites few of us here have likely heard of.
If your niche website is not receiving significant traffic, and I know that many startup web app companies are not, then there's something wrong with your marketing, your product or your luck. It's probably not that your target market is saturated - there's very few that are.
People will share information with groups of people they know they can relate to that they never would share in a general public forum. We all seek empathy and many of us have life experiences that cannot be meaningfully discussed outside of a context of shared understanding and a base of common experience. People in recovery from substance abuse is one such huge market, people with communicable diseases another, the insanely wealthy yet another - and the list goes on.
Groups on existing social networks may satisfy some of this demand, but not the way that dedicated, topical "walled-gardens" will.
Talk to the people at Vox, at Multiply, at Tumblr and elsewhere and they will tell you that there is substantial demand for social networking and content publishing functionality behind a wall of permission.
The idea that "privacy is gone" is itself an illusion. People choose what they publish to the open web and many choose to publish to closed pages for family, friends or even just personal consumption.
The page that drove so much traffic to SoberCircle today? A prurient tale about "the most dangerous drug in the world," used in various crimes related to sex. (Not linking to it here, but you tried to click, didn't you?)
Every niche that has its members has its scandal. People will come to your site if they can find that scandal and if they are interested enough in the niche, they will return. Fetishes themselves are infinite. I swear though, I read Valleywag daily for research purposes only!
They will for work or a particular hobby, though.
From OpenID to OAuth to Open Widget - I mean Google's Open Social - many, many people are working to make it easier to move from one social network to another.
When, in the glorious future, you can explore a new network with an existing login - knowing that if you choose to leave it you can take your new friends, writings etc. with you back to your home base, then social networks will flourish. When I can easily post one blog post to both my Facebook notes and my SoberCircle profile (example only!) and another post to SoberCircle alone - then market conditions will have arrived for niche networks to truly thrive.
I really believe that this industry is just in its infancy. None of the incumbents are guaranteed total domination into the future and there's no reason to believe that the long tail of niche social networks won't prove economically viable, individually as well as in aggregate. Of course most startups in this sector will fail, that's the case in any sector, but as startup tech markets go I think it's a very smart market to be getting into right now.
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I would additionally say for some that they have maybe simply one specific function in which they work very well, like flickr for photos, Youtube for videos and so on.
On the other hand you have those general-purpose social networks like Facebook or MySpace (and thanks to OpenSocial probably soon a lot more) which try to be everything. I am not sure they do these many things that well then though.
What I'd like to see in the future is really being able to port your social graph from one service to the other or even better to let them just subscribe to your social graph be it stored where you wish.
Social Networks would then be more social applications because the network is just mine.
Posted by: Christian Scholz | November 19, 2007 2:58 PM
Oh, and who btw will create a social network where social network makers can connect? :-)
Posted by: Christian Scholz | November 19, 2007 2:59 PM
Great post Marshall, and one that touches me personally. I developed and maintain (as a hobby) a Latino community site called Oyeme (http://www.oyeme.com) and I've seen steady growth and endless thank you notes from Latinos that live all over the world. At times I think about closing it, as we have the Facebooks of the world and then I realize there's something more in here -- a sense of community that you can't carry with you even if another site seems better/more complex. I've asked my users about why they don't leave to other sites and the majority just replies that they can't get what they get in Oyeme anywhere else.
Posted by: Jorge Escobar | November 19, 2007 3:14 PM
Christian, that's a real good point, thanks for adding it.
Jorge, that's a great story, thanks for telling it here. Take that, cynical world!! Ha ha, yeah.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | November 19, 2007 3:22 PM
This is how I see it. The world is diverse. People are different from one another. As long as this diversity is there, there will be a market for niche social networks and this is what the long tail is about. It may be hard for Americans to understand the importance of diversity but as a person of Indian origin, I know what diversity is. This diversity in the world is the reason why there appears to be a never ending market for social networks. This diversity was not celebrated in the pre-web era and thatz why we saw the build up of a hit based economy. With the advent of internet, this diversity could be celebrated, encouraged in the market and thatz why we see a never ending flow of niche social networks. It should be encouraged and celebrated.
My dream for the future of social networks is a collection of vertical social networks catering to all sorts of niche and I should be able to be part of these networks from a global dashboard. Thatz why I call for an open standards approach to social networking in each and every available opportunity.
Posted by: Krish | November 19, 2007 3:35 PM
Did I forget to add that openID is the key to my dream global dashboard :-)
Posted by: Krish | November 19, 2007 3:37 PM
Your post hit the nail right on the head. Niche markets are unlimited. We saw this a few years back when we started created networks for schools, coaches and organizations. These groups wanted to communicate with their own audience and not be part of some big group of people they didn't know. We started out as a one size fits all local social network but soon realized that niche specific networks are where it's at. So we switched http://onmycity.com from being a social network to a platform that niche social networks can use.
Posted by: Craig | November 19, 2007 3:58 PM
I agree with you that we are going to be seeing more niche social networks (I’m working on one myself.) However, I do wonder where they will take us.
http://www.muziekpedia.com/songteksten/d/deep-purple/index.php
Posted by: Muziekpedia | November 19, 2007 10:37 PM
Similar question to Christian's: who will create a social network for people addicted to social networking?
Posted by: Andrew | November 19, 2007 11:13 PM
Marshall, this is the best thing I've seen on RWW in a long, long time. Very insightful, it gave me a lot of good ideas. Glad you pointed this out.
Posted by: Joel | November 20, 2007 7:10 AM
Extremely insightful! Well written article.
Posted by: Lapp | November 20, 2007 7:23 AM
Excellent, excellent article. It inspired an article that I wrote on the same basic topic. Mine isn't as well written, but takes the same ideas and shows them from a different perspective.
http://socialnewswatch.com/niche-social-networks/
Posted by: SocialNewsWatch | November 20, 2007 12:05 PM
Welcome to the world of narrowcasting! ;D
There are about 1 googol domains per TLD. There are about 300 TLDs. So the market for social networks is not infinite, but it's pretty damn close.
However, there are only about 7 billion people on Earth, and the number of languages is also rapidly decreasing. And the vocabulary of most speakers is far less than 1 million terms (and it would be quite an overstatement to say that there should be a a distinct "online social community" for every concept in each community's language).
Currently there are more domains registered than there are books in some of the world's largest libraries. How many sites will become community hubs? You might look to the number of periodical titles in circulation, or perhaps also the number of yellow-pages categories might give a ball park figure. I would say maybe 10,000 -- but my hunch is that in the near term it will probably be in the hundreds or perhaps low thousands.
:) nmw
Posted by: nmw | November 20, 2007 1:45 PM
More than "niche markets for social networks", I think we're looking at "portions of peoples lives".
No person is purely public, or purely private. If the social web is going to work, it's going to need to become capable of a flexible balance between public and private - especially as the web comes out of the box and into more pervasive devices.
Looking forward to seeing if and how social networks will evolve to better represent whole people, not fractions of them. It'll be fun to look back on this time a few years down the road.
Posted by: Tara Kelly | November 20, 2007 2:06 PM
Good article, and relevant for our work here on the Faroe Islands. We are working on a social network for Faroese people all over the world and if anything is a niche then people from the faroe islands is. We are only about 50.000 people living on the islands and maybe 25.000 living outside the islands.
Take care,
Oli Olsen
netverk.fo
Posted by: Oli Olsen | November 21, 2007 11:33 AM
Spot on! And it's nice to know there is such a thing as an open source "social platform": http://www.elgg.org/ This should make it easier to establish new networks, to cater for the "long tail"!
Posted by: Magnus Enger | November 28, 2007 5:50 AM
Very relevant.
The market for niche-networks is certainly infinite... what is not infinite is user's patience in recreating contact lists and relationships. Hopefully, initiatives like OpenSocial will eventually allow users to mix-and-match their favorite social networks.
I've blogged about this issue (in Spanish) at http://technosailor.com/2007/11/06/networks-sociales-portatiles-hacia-la-web-30/
Posted by: Carlos Granier-Phelps | November 28, 2007 9:04 AM
This diversity in the world is the reason why there appears to be a never ending market for social networks
Posted by: Soma | November 30, 2007 1:41 AM