This is the last in a short series of posts that explore one metric that may help us recognize a community–traffic. By looking at some data, I’m wondering if community websites may have a signature traffic curve. I describe the curve in the first post, offering a few examples. Don’t miss the comments in this first post as Clay Shirky challenges me on my use of traffic numbers to Secondlife.com as a proxy for actual community involvement in-world. Also, J. Thomas Lowell at fulminator.com adds to the conversation.

In the second post, I offer more examples and compare them to successful marketing websites that aren’t communities, to begin to contrast one from the other.

In this last post, I look at a few fast growing communities that I call Superstars, to see if we can learn anything from them.

First, Youtube.com:

Youtube.com

The youtube.com traffic curve shows growth that happened quickly, with very little of the asymptotic-ness of other community traffic curves at the beginning of their lives. Youtube was founded in February, 2005. It wasn’t until Q4 ‘05 that interest took off–and it wasn’t a slow build. It was a quick sprint to popularity. Think about it, as I write this, Youtube isn’t even a year old.

The next site is flickr:

Flickr.com

Flickr’s a year older than youtube. The slope of the curve shows a slower rise than youtube, but shares the characteristic of a relatively short stay at the small community level.

Conclusion

So, I’m thinking that a typical community traffic curve looks like this:

The first section is the building of the core community. There are a relatively small, but active number of members. Many would be particularly committed to the community. In later times, it may be referred back with some sentimentality.

The next section is the growth phase. More members are coming in; most likely there will be conflict as new values and old values collide.

The third stage is the maturity stage. The community is much larger than in the beginning, but can sustain itself. My hunch is that it’s not really one big community, but more a community of communities as people tend to like smaller, cozier groups.
I haven’t outlined a final stage, decline, but nothing lasts forever.

The community websites I cited, secondlife.com, myspace.com, drupal.org, wordpress.org, wikpedia.org, boingboing.net, bloglines.com follow this curve, I believe. Even with jumps caused by media mentions, the basic idea is still there. The marketing cites I sited, subservientchicken.com, milliondollarhomepage.com, eepybird.com, do not.

And that’s the crux of the argument and purpose for these posts, to contrast community websites with marketing websites. The quick hits on the marketing websites are fed either by: 1) viral activity driving traffic, or 2) by media driving traffic. But, they don’t have the staying power of communities for sustained activity.

I think the superstars look more like the growth phase, spending less time in the core community phase. For whatever reason, they get really popular really fast and take off like a rocket. Still, they spend some time in the community building phase, even if it’s only a handful of months for YouTube.
I don’t know if I have a testable hypothesis yet, but I think the lessons to learn are:

1) Communities take time to build, but there will be a growth phase.

2) The building takes a while, with what may look like little total activity going on. However, this phase is crucial as the community defines itself and develops core values and participants. Only the superstars speed through this phase.

3) So, if you’re a community based website, you need to set everyone’s expectations (investors, etc.) that it’s going to take a while for the audience to build to sizes that may make sense to a traditional marketer.
4) If you need quick hits, go for a more traditional marketing approach, don’t go for building a community. However, quick hits are not sustainable.

In other words, communities can be sustainable, marketing driven websites cannot.

Marketing driven websites need media spends to keep them going. More about this at a later time.

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts.