The Rise of Niche Social Networks and That Money Question

Check out virb.com. A new social network that is attracting the web professionals. And it's pretty.

My fear in the monetization of all these broad-interest social networks is their potential to become over-valued. After all, NewsCorp can project great future earnings for MySpace based on the growth they've seen. Their projections, however, seem to require still more 13 year-old girls and unsigned metal bands to find out about MySpace because they haven't already.

Certainly niche sites like you mentioned can both have steady growth, as well as provide the kind of targeted interest that keeps users from feeling their interests are being ignored.

Ticketmaster.com should have its own social network strapped to its hip. Really getting people in the door is their trick not just page views. Then connecting people from the Ticketmaster event into local pizza joints with 20 of your best friend to a reserved table is it. Same for catering the tail gate parties before the event. Real people looking for corporate box seating or even tickets in exchange for a look into your car dealership. That and local movies seating that have been captured by ISP's are real social networks, the extra need to be added like Ebays developers. Every sports team and high school needs event support outside the school. Same for adding extras to theme parks they all should have more than a local tv or radio sponsorships.

Check out Fast Pitch! (www.fastpitchonline.com). These guys get it! It's one of the first business networking sites that has figured out how to monetize it's user base beyond just advertising and subscription (i.e. pay to connect). The website offers its users (business professionals) a suite of value-added services by leveraging it's own userbase to help people promote their business. Even more compelling is the kind of data they capture about each user... I can't help but wonder what kind of vertical advertising and cross-selling they are capable of (I'll save my thoughts on this for my own blog) :)

Will Vertical Search and Social Networks combine to challenge Google?

Publishers and advertising agencies have a very difficult challenge ahead as traditional “horizontal” media like newspapers, TV channels and magazines see their traditional demographics and advertising revenue streams fragmented by the increasing preference of consumers for online access and the huge presence of Google eroding their audiences and potential future revenues.

Perhaps they should remember the words of Sun Tsu, who once said “When the enemy is too strong to attack directly, then attack something he holds dear. Know that in all things he cannot be superior. Somewhere there is a gap in the armour, a weakness that can be attacked instead.” Google’s major strength – the clean search box and the ease of use, commoditised ad revenues, perhaps masks its principal weakness. As media content and advertising revenues fragment to serve thousands and thousands of “vertical” online communities based on lifestyle or profession, Google may suddenly seem standardised, commoditised and lacking a sense of unique community. Is Google becoming Wal-Mart, while vertical communities may prefer Harrods?

Whilst “horizontal” media companies are similar to supermarkets, specialist professional “vertical” publishers are very specific in serving niche communities with totally relevant content and requirements. However, the publisher’s principal operating difficulty in becoming adaptive to this asymmetric Web 2.0 opportunity is that most tend to run each of their print, exhibition and online titles/businesses as separate profit and loss items on their balance sheet. As a by-product the vast majority tend not to have a centralised IT infrastructure or the human IT skill sets to manage a large scale data centre or web spidering facility – the prerequisites needed to datamine and aggregate open source, user generated and blog content to create vertical slices of the Web that are relevant for their audiences. Publishers will also need to integrate this content into the online extensions of their print brands and thereby allowing advertisers the opportunity to target high value communities. In addition, the datamining, crawling and hosting to identify relevant open source content will also need to be a continual process due to the continual growth of user generated and open source content.

Convera have two very large data centres, an extensive web spidering capability and a web index. Convera are now partnering with a significant number of specialist B2B publishers to create a range of vertical websites for specific professional communities. The first example of this is Searchmedica.com with UBM.

In building the deep vertical search portals, the key is to reach into the specific professional community in a number of ways. First, you can combined the trade publisher's knowledge and contacts in the profession with community appeals that engage the specific audience in a way that general search cannot, and also by taking special care to use the taxonomies common to the targeted profession in organizing search results so that the user feels more at home and among peers. Building a good vertical engine can be costly and time consuming, and getting a critical mass of users to de-Google their search habits into more specialized engines is potentially a tough sell. However, in tests with focus groups from different professional communities to test these vertical search properties against Google, the results are hugely encouraging.

In building the beta test sites, the specialist publishers are providing Convera with "white lists" of data sources online and websites that would be most relevant to its readers so that the searches are restricted to reliable and trusted information. Publishers are also securing agreements with owners of key proprietary content not normally crawled by Google by leveraging some of its contacts and resources so that Convera can crawl and deliver some of their proprietary content. Another key consideration is getting the user community engaged in the process as co-developers. No matter how bad the results at Google or Yahoo may be for a given professional segment, the interface is familiar and the destination is always at hand. Getting users to think of a specialized brand as the go-to place for business information is the challenge.

A number of publishers are actively assessing the potential of adding social networking to the mix in order to get professionals interacting with each other and adding weekly podcasts by industry experts on issues affecting the community – these additional services will create more community loyalty and also additional advertising and sponsorship opportunities.

The publishers can also use their print titles to drive the audience to the new online areas and this will also assist the transition of their high value print ad revenues to online. Publishers also have exhibitions, seminars, events and email newsletters to assist this transition – and recent research suggests that professional communities will actively attend seminars and events to meet peers and other members of their community. The theory goes that once you get some professionals involved then the viral mechanism or behavioural “Hive Mind” also kicks in and professional workers start referring to the vertical portal as a community source. It is also allows advertisers and public relations organisations access to a clearly defined, affluent, influential and stable audience.

Google does not allow you to have a beer with a potential business partner - it doesn't have that sense of community. But Google is fighting back – the recent launch of Google Custom Search and acquisition of teenage social network sites indicates they are aware of their weakness – but specialist publishers see this as a Trojan Horse. Social networks for teenagers are highly transient and target a demographic that is volatile, unpredictable and has a low level of disposable income – whereas a social network alongside a vertical search service for 22,000 bio-chemists, 55,000 UK GP’s, 55,000 insurance risk assessors or 120,000 US psychiatrists is stable, affluent and attractive for advertisers.

Weirdly enough, the most animated and joyous social network I have run across is a social network for horse lovers called YourBarn. I did a little surfing around and the community, seems fairly diverse in age and geography and fiercely in love with...photographing, writing about, and fawning over others'...horses. A LOT of content.

The site platform is extremely stable (no pun intended) and all functionality worked flawlessly. I wonder who did the backend work, it blows the doors off the functionality of MySpace (but i guess that is not hard). I am interested to see how big this grows, don't know how many horse people there are, but these guys seem to be attracting members at a pretty good clip from the few times i have checked in....

This is a good example of a specific social networkinig site for young horse mad riders!

Visit Starponyz at www.starponyz.com and you will see an exciting new and professional site created specially for young riders. Starponyz visitors can create their ideal horse or pony, learn more about riding and horse care and it even lets them create their own web page so they can keep in touch with other riders.

Niche social networks have experienced huge growth this year and this field will continue to grow in 2008. Companies and brands will build their own social networks to engage and market to interested parties.

We’ve recently launched a search engine that helps users find niche interest social networks and helps social network owners promote them.

Users search for sites related to whatever their interest is and webmasters submit their sites tagged with related keywords.

The idea is that due to the increasing popularity and proliferation of niche subject social networking sites thanks to Ning et al, users have a way of finding like-minded communities and these social networks receive targeted traffic that helps build user base and monetize.

Please take a look! We’re still building the database. Feel free to register and submit your niche social network or social media site for free.

http://findasocialnetwork.com

Those are some great social references, especially like the ones on the equine as I have an equine classified network.

I am installing a social platform because of the demand from my clientel.

I like the community that they build and seems like they really are taking place of the forums.

Well thanks for the great posts and stop by and say hello, the platform will functioning at clubequine.com in about a week from this post date.

Ron

I would recommend a social network for horse people called Barn Culture. It is really active and the people are quite nice. http://www.barnculture.com

I would check out 100bestsocialnetworksites.com for a huge list of available niche sites.

Here are two companies who are more interested in making social content instead of social networking one
apollomatrix.com is more of an SEO company that buildscustom social content sites for 10K it has all the common social network functionality and plenty of any extensions available. They will complete a custom business development program for you and they help incubate startups.

Another Site I just heard about http://buildasocialnetworkingbusiness.com/

Is doing a Grand opening launch April 1st 2009 they are selling 100 sites for $100 at http://buildasocialnetworkingbusiness.com/ ... I would watch out for these two companies

I run a camping social network called Burnt Marshmallows. It is quickly becoming a popular website for camping lovers.

http://www.burntmarshmallows.com