Niche markets suck
:: Friday, April 16th, 2004 @ 9:34:12 am
:: Tags: Thoughtful
How is it that my personal website gets more visitors than does Wetpixel.com, a site considered one of the premiere sites in its (very narrow) industry? It’s upsetting. Perhaps I should invest some of the (very little) income I’m getting from Wetpixel back into its own marketing. Thus far, we have grown — through word of mouth — into a site that gets nearly 30,000 unique visits per month. But my site here is getting around 35,000 uniques a month.
I recognize that our readership at Wetpixel is valuable because it is extremely targeted. Most people who visit the site are loyal, returning day after day. But collecting a tiny sliver of a huge “market” seems to work better than getting a larger share of a tiny market. I really wonder how many digital underwater photographers there are out there in the world. Probably not many. Oh well; at last I have fun running the site — most of the time. :)
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Hi, Eric
I see your thoughts got some impulse from our recent traffic publictation where I benchmarked our sites. :-)
yes, andi — that’s right. we get so little traffic compared to similar sites in other industries.
Scuba diving is a niche. Underwater photographers make up a minority of divers. Wetpixel is digital — still another subset of uw photography. So wetpixel is still just part of a niche and probably always will be. I know of no one getting rich in the dive industry. Many people trying to make a living find they must do more than “one thing” in the industry or must diversify to areas outside of the industry as well. They call it a “labor of love.”
now I feel bad for never visiting wetpixel.com
:(
-B
you run a site called wetpixel ?
you know what bothers me .. is i never get any comments on my webpage … and I consider myself lucky to get that many hits between all of my sites, although http://www.digitallywet.com seems to pull in the most at about 25,000 as it’s highest but normally close on 20,000. Now apparently they are unique, but i dont believe it. I know its all because of the images people like looking at photos. I wish there was a way of getting people to tell me if they liked it or not .. http://www.digitallywet.com/mc.....amp;id=269
that photo of my friend gets the most views too … but that doesnt surprise me.
and maybe you should just mention wetpixel every time you post in here … or put a banner up on your splash page.
But then … will you be attracting people who just look at it … and then leave and you have falsely high numbers.
I find that when i go around shouting in loads of forums i get loads of hits.
hey, giles! do I run wetpixel? hrmph. :)
you have to try to establish community at your site. it doesn’t have the feel of a community, for some reason. you sort of have news — but not personal journal sort of news… just news about photo stuff.
and forums around personal sites are almost always going to fail, unless you are a performer of some sort with a loyal fanbase…
and damn your quick … although … i meant on http://www.shaxted.co.uk/giles
;)
i know the forums are meant to come out.
its not really a personal site, its more just my photo site, the update news bit is meant to be literally just that so that you know when the site has had changes.
My trouble is I bought the wrong gallery software, and didnt have any direction for http://www.digitallywet.com
It used to be an educational site teaching underwater digital photography online, including an interactive course .. i obviously found that I didnt have time for that. And I think people were just buying the course to get their hands on my instruction manual and hence re use it themselves. more fool them, the cost of the course was a lot for 10 pages of paper that were very out of date by the end of it.
Anyway, yeah I am thinking of integrating my personal site and my photo site, just not sure how or when or where yet, I am thinking about using wordpress, but I have trouble making that look how I want to. ANd then I need to buy new gallery stuff. we’ll see .. when i get some time and am done messing around with YUP