Enthusiasts Find Big Is Not Always Best With Social Networks
May 7th, 2008, 12:43 am Hobbies Ideas
Forget Facebook, MySpace or any other online hangout that boasts tens or hundreds of millions of people.
For Teresa Munoz, Athlinks (population: 34,000) is the place to be. She uses the community devoted to competitive running, swimming and biking events to find training partners and get advice, including information about her first Ironman triathlon.
Munoz, 45, of Hacienda Heights, Calif., said she tried finding like-minded people on MySpace, but found only those “looking for people to date, not really there for the sport. I didn’t get as much out of that.”
MySpace, Facebook and, to a smaller degree, Bebo may be getting most of the attention, but social-networking sites geared toward hobbies, sports and other specific interests — alongside those targeting certain age groups, ethnicities or diseases — are finding growing success as supplements to the larger online hangouts or even as replacements.
Katie Ellis, 23, an Athlinks user from Phoenix, said she likes the fact that the site automatically generates rivals, alongside friends, based on races in which they have unknowingly competed together. A competitor at heart, Ellis said she often peeks at their race times and notes how often she had beaten them.
Why not MySpace or Facebook? Ellis said that after seeing her older brother use both, she’s concluded “I think it’s a waste of time.”
Like MySpace and Facebook, the free sites are largely generating revenue through advertising. As the larger sites struggle to capitalize on their diverse membership, the specialty sites believe they can offer advertisers a smaller, but passionate audience for which they’d be willing to pay more — as much as 10 times more, Athlinks estimates.
The popularity of such niches goes to show that big isn’t always better.
Though the larger sites let users create groups on any topic or interest, finding the right groups and identifying the most dedicated members can be daunting.
“What happens is a medium reaches a point where the users of it start to think it’s interesting but it’s too big, there are too many people, it’s too difficult to find what I’m interested in,” said Steve Jones, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor who tracks Internet culture.
It happened with television. It happened with magazines. It’s now happening with the Internet and social-networking sites.
ActiveBoating.com has fewer than 200 members congregating around recreational boating, but the site’s vice president, Randy Young, said he’d rather have the most passionate 200 than a million with only passing interest.
The 1 million users on Goodreads can find one another based on specific books they have read, are reading or want to read — the “compare books” feature returns the percentage of matches between two users’ virtual bookshelves. On News Corp.’s MySpace and Facebook, search is limited to specific keywords or titles.
“I find the people who loved the same novels I did and send them friend invitations,” said Laura Stamps, 51, an author and Goodreads user in Columbia, S.C. “That may be one reason why my (nearly 500 friends) are so chatty. We love the same books.”
Ravelry has become so popular among knitters and crochet lovers that users must wait months before getting off the waiting list for membership.
Those who make it on can share patterns they have created along with ideas on what they can make with the specific types of yarn they own.
“This is invaluable research for someone who is about to invest many dollars and hours of their life in a knitting project,” said Mary-Helen Ward, 56. “It certainly cuts down the chances of expensive disappointment.”
Ward said Ravelry offers depth and breadth on knitting like no other social network. After all, where else could the eLearning project manager at the University of Sydney find “Ivory Tower Fiber Freaks,” a forum devoted to academics who knit?
She said she tried a few craft-related groups on Facebook but found participants “all really young, immature and not very knitting-literate.”
Tags: age group, amp, audience, enthusiasts, Hobbies, lace, passion, perce, population, recreational boating, relat, sportsRelated posts
