Smart Aggregation, Not Search or RSS, Is Key In Getting Valuable Traffic
Fred Wilson has shared where the traffic to his blog, A VC, comes from. He made an important notion on how the majority of users have come to his site through search engines, but their dominance has declined in the past year. He notes that an almost good a source has been from sites he calls smart aggregators. By these he means sites that aggregate either algorithmically (Techmeme) or through user behavior (Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon) the most important new articles. The importance of these aggregators will surely continue to grow especially in topics like technology.
As Fred mentions himself, the traffic from RSS-readers has not increased for him, because they just are too hard for the average user to use. I have to admit that I personally fall into the same category. It’s not that I don’t see the value of RSS-readers, it’s just better (easier, faster) for me to get a pre-prioritized list of the most important news and post through Techmeme or even Friendfeed.
For most publishers and bloggers getting traffic from these smart aggregators is more valuable than getting traffic from search engines using some random keywords. Fred Wilson correctly divides search engine results between “search bookmarks”, which should be counted as direct traffic, and real search. The importance of Search Engine Optimization is not diminishing: see my earlier post about the declining importance of URL’s in navigation as opposed to search.
Death Of The Domain Names Is Near
Or more correctly: the slow decline of the importance of domain names has begun. Cabel Sasser wrote an inspiring article about how in Japan they do not use URL’s on billboard ads, but instead they have pictures of search boxes with keywords. This is done beacause all the good domain names are already gone, but more importantly, as Snipperoo pointed out, people do not remember domain-names, instead they input the brand or product name into search boxes i.e. use search for navigation.
How many domain names do you remember?
When thinking about this I realized that domain names are becoming more like phone numbers, you need them to get to the right place, but nobody really remembers them anymore. The most important ones you have written down (bookmarked) and for the others you use the white pages (Google).
[via Techmeme]
[Original image from Cabel.name]
Teen Age Girls Will Take Over The Internet
New York Times has an article on the differences of online behavior between teenage girls and boys. The article is based on an earlier PEW research report Teens and Social Media that found that girls are more creative than boys online. Girls blog more, are more active on social networking sites, post more photos and create more websites of their own. The only area where boys are more creative is shooting and posting videos.
Read more…
6% of Users Are Responsible for 50% of Clicks on Ads
A new study conducted by Starcom, Tacoda and comScore aptly named “Natural Born Clickers” reveals that 6% of online users are responsible for 50% of all clicks on online ads.
Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.
Twitter Ready for Main-Stream Competition?
Twitter is a great service. The microblogging platform is already the fastest media when it comes to technology and Silicon Valley related news. Twitter is proving to be more and more useful all the time.
It’s a shame Jaiku wasn’t able to keep its front runner position after being bought by Google. Jaiku is the very reason why Twitter hasn’t gotten picked up here in Finland at all, but Worldwide Twitter has close to 900k users (according to TwitDir) and has evolved to become the better service. Read more…
Blogosphere Roundup: ChicagoCrime, Million Dollar Homepage, DEMO Companies
Due to hosting problems I haven’t had the possibility to post in a while. Here’s a short recap on some of the more interesting things that have emerged in the blogosphere during the past two weeks.
List of Google Killers: Search Engines of the Future
I’ve compiled a list of search engines that will change the way search engines work. I’ve only listed general-purpose sites, not niche or vertical search engines focusing in a specific type of information. I’m not really claiming these services will replace Google as the number one search engine any time soon, but they will at least have an effect on the way Google and the other large search engines will develop their core function.
List of the search engines of the future:
Read more…
Startups from Finland: Zipipop Makes Life and Feedback More Fun
Zipipop’s mission is to share life and make feedback more fun. Whatever that means. So far they have released a couple of Facebook apps, but apparently their initial business idea had something to do with feedback – hence the logo that features Zipi the feedback fish.
I’ll have to cover Zipipop again when I’ll find out what they are really trying to accomplish.
Startups from Finland: Petsie – Social Networking for Pets
Petsie is social networking for pets. Dogs, cats, horses, rodents – you name it – even rubber ducks. The site doesn’t have that many networking features, just the the typical profiles with commenting and the possibility to have friends. A nice feature is the abilities of each pet – cleanliness (from sleazebag to clean), intelligence, speed etc. The pets’ owners also have their profiles.
Petsie was started in 2006 and so far there are more than 17k pets on the site. The service is available currently in three languages: English, Finnish and Swedish.
2008: Problems for Google, Facebook
Forecasting the future is never easy, but the writers of Read/WriteWeb have looked into their crystal balls. It seems that this year will be hard for Google and Facebook. But what will be the biggest thing on the web in 2008? It seems that even they don’t know about it yet.
My predictions are summarized in the following sentence: Asian Open Mobile Twitter Widgets go mainstream.
Some interesting predictions in the original post’s comments as well. Virtual Knitting will be huge!
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