Niche or Sub-Niches

by Paul on December 7th, 2005

Today I had already planned on talking about whether it was wise to focus on a site that covers a niche or a bunch of sites that cover a lot of sub-niches. Then I happened to come across Tyme’s article yesterday on the Cookie Cutter Effect and saw even more relevance in posting this entry. While Tyme’s entry focuses a bit more on the quality of the content, something I will touch upon, I would like to focus more on the effects of sub-niches on audiences, traffic and if/when you should break your site up into little pieces.

Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of sub-niches in my opinion.

Advantages

Potentially more traffic Gearing your site towards a sub-niche may better help you dominate that topic in the search engines and effectively providing you with more traffic.
Tighter community You can form a tighter community because people are more than likely to have a passion for Hoover vaccuum cleaners than general cleaning equipment.
More sites Again some people equate more sites to more potential in gaining traffic and making money. I don’t really follow this philosophy, but that’s just me. Ironic coming from the member of the 9rules team no? Also, more sites mean more links from differing domains.

Disadvantages

Fragmented Userbase Even though you have the potential of building a tighter community you also have the potential to fragment your userbase amongst your sites. Is it better to have 100k people on one site or 20k on five different ones?
Loss in quality There is potential for the quality of the content to drop since more resources are being spread amongst more sites. I have learned this from personal experience, but it was only because I was one person trying to do the work of 12.

Case Study

Let’s look at the videogame niche because you can easily see the sub-niches that could spawn from it. Joystiq is one of WIN’s most popular websites (2nd most behind Engadget if I am correct), but it’s not without its own issues. For normal readers like myself the site is updated way too often. For Search Engines that’s a good thing and I am betting that a major chunk of their traffic is from SEs, but for daily visitors 30-40-50 entries a day can become tiring and you simply start to weed through RSS headlines without even bothering to clickthrough.

From this perspective I can understand why WIN would launch XBOX360 Fanboy, PSP Fanboy, and WOW Insider. Was this the right move though from a reader/user perspective? This could make things more confusing because who do I expect to post news on the XBOX 360, Joystiq or the fan boy site? Do both sites report all 360 news and if so then there wasn’t really a point in branching out with another site.

I think WIN has become addicted with simply adding pages and not content. Obviously there is money in pageviews and an assload of content, but does anybody think it would be possible to get the same amount of pageviews with more original content? I think that would be interesting to see.

My Advice

I would advise that if you pick a niche that has a lot of potential sub-niches that you focus on a general site for that niche and make it popular. Once it explodes then you should consider branching out to more sites if you feel it is the best thing to do. Now you may think why would Manolo Shoeblog do something like this when he has been successful in his little sub-niche. Well I would argue that his sub-niches would be Reebok and Nike type sites so hopefully you can see where I am going with this.

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