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What Internet Users Really Want

TechCrunch, one of the most well-trafficked websites documenting the tech industry, gets over 5 million pageviews per month (source) which comes out to about 166k pageviews per day. That’s about one third the pageviews Fleshbot (NSFW) gets per day which is the adult brand within Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire. I only put these two together because Fleshbot is simply one adult blog within the gigantic masses of all the other adult blogs and sites on the web, and although it only has the tiniest fraction of adult Internet mindshare, it still does some serious traffic, far surpassing the largest blog in the Web 2.0 world. Now compare Fleshbot’s traffic to Perez Hilton who does over 6 million pageviews a day, and you’ll see yet another huge gap.

The Tech Industry Is Like A Puddle In The Web’s Ocean Of Opportunity

When entrepreneurs and investors like to talk about the biggest Web 2.0 “wins” — MySpace, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Skype — they’re not really talking about companies within the traditional “Web 2.0″ space but the ones who used web technologies to power something outside the scope of the tech industry. Everybody has social networking profiles. Everyone likes to see funny or viral videos. Everyone likes the ability to talk to others around the world for free. Everybody has photos they’d like to share, or likes to view their friends’ photos. Technologists within the web industry may think of Flickr as the champion of various web technologies, but that wasn’t the reason they were bought. Flickr had an appeal to people who weren’t techie at all, they just wanted a great place to share their pictures. YouTube may have brought video sharing capabilities to the masses and brought about the Flash Video revolution, but the most popular YouTube videos of all time are simply funny or dumb videos that are interesting to normal people who don’t care about Flash Video or the technologies that made that video view possible.

For companies that are entering the web industry now, clamoring to announce their startup at one of the launchpad conferences in front of their fellow geeks, my advice is to look at the scale of your audience. Many say that the best way to create an application or a website is to think about it in terms of if you were the target audience and user, but I don’t completely agree with that. If you’re a geek and you’re creating a company and you want traffic and revenues to soar, then your best bet isn’t to target one of the smallest audiences out there, aka, other geeks. TechCrunch does 160K+ pageviews per day and they’re essentially the loudest voice in the web industry, so scale that audience back and think how hard you have to work to win over even a small percentage point of those users if you’re targeting tech-savvy individuals.

On the other hand if you’re interested in a larger slice of the pie, try creating a service that gets out of the tech arena and brings some value to what the other 99.9% of web users are viewing daily. Not everyone knows what an RSS feed is, let alone Ajax, Ruby on Rails, “mashups”, or anything else you might be thinking as being interesting. Mainstream users shop online, view funny videos and stories, and keep their social networking profiles up-to-date. Keep that in mind next time you see a company built around the idea of mashing service X with utility Y, where X and Y have yet to be proven.