Community Websites

This is the second in a series of posts exploring the possibility of looking at traffic to a website as an indicator of what a successful community website looks like.

First, continuing on the theme of yesterday’s post, here are traffic graphs from Alexa for three more web communities that were built primarily on word of mouth and the associated PR they generated.

Wikipedia

BoingBoing

Bloglines

Briefly, the point is this: By comparing graphs like these, it looks like a “community” can be defined by a graph of traffic to the website over time that exhibits the following characteristics:

1) a ‘long-tail” of slow growth in absolute numbers, but critical in the development of the community, as a lot is going on.

2) a growth phase that looks somewhat like logarithmic growth, leading to,

3) a maturity phase, or leveling off of growth, but something sustainable. (See the Myspace curve in the previous post for this last, maturity stage.)

The sharp jumps in the above graphs could be attributable to media mentions, but the basic curve is still visible.

The growth phase could be due to the network effects; meaning, if you look at the community as a network of people, the value of the network increases as more people are brought into the network and continue to participate in it.

Marketing Websites

Now, let’s take a look at a few websites that are successful “marketing” websites and see what they look like.

First, love it, hate it, or bored with it: Subservientchicken.com, the website that did more for viral marketing than…oh, I’ll skip the bad metaphor.

Subservient Chicken

Note the initial spike, brought on by the viral spread and media mentions. There’s an echo of the original spike the following quarter and then a fairly quick decay. The point is that there’s a hit, followed by a decay.

Million Dollar Homepage

Next is the Million Dollar Homepage, the website founded by college student Alex Tew to generate money for college. He sold ad space and divided it up so that all the ad space sold totaled US$1 million. He gained a lot of media exposure on both sides of the pond the second half of 2005 and early 2006.

The initial interest occurred around August, 2005. The spike at 2006 is most likely attributable to Tew’s e-bay auction of the last $30,000 of ad space and the resulting publicity. The little spike at the end of 2006 is most likely attributable to his announcement of his new project–the One Billion Dollar Home Page. Alex accomplished an interesting feat: initial interest in Q4 2005 followed by larger interest Q1 2006. Then, the quick decay set in.

EepyBird.com The Mentos & Diet Coke Guys

You’ve seen the video on the Internet or on Letterman, right? It’s the two guys dressed in labcoats dropping Mentos candy into Diet Coke bottles and creating a Bellagio fountain affect. This is the website that started it all:

A similar story to the typical marketing/viral/non-community website. A lot of quick interest followed by obvious decay, with a blip or two on the decay side.

I picked these three websites because they illustrate campaigns that would be attractive to marketers; indeed, they were seen as innovative by many marketing types. But what do they teach us? They clearly illustrate the difference between a media driven website and a community website. The shape of the curve is what’s important. In a media driven site (and I’m using this terminology to include paid media, PR, and viral spread), the interest increases quickly, but also tends to decay over time. This is the opposite of a community site, which builds over time.

My hypothesis is that in a non-community site, a media company will only be successful as the pour money into ad campaigns to keep the interest up. However, with a community site, the interest is inherent, so people remain engaged. This distinctions are important when planning out campaigns, setting expectations on results, and educating clients about marketing with community.

Up next: What we can learn from the superstars.