Web 2.0 is about Niche Markets


Back in May there was a wonderful article on BrainFuel called The Niche Get Richer by our guest author Ward Andrews.

PostBubble has an short article about how Web 2.0 monetization models, and I think it’s spot on. Essentially the point is that to be successful online and dominate a market, the best chances you have are to go after a niche market.

The article points to several examples in the social networking market, but I’d like to take it a step further. For example, CoffeeGeek.com dominates the coffee industry online. It wins hands down. Since I don’t have the time to go after that huge market, I’ve decided to dominate the Arizona market with my coffee blog called Arizona Coffee. That’s cool. I can easily dominate AZ coffee by doing this (and think I do, after only 1 year).

The key is to really find a space that is vacant or needs some love and attention. There can only be a few MySpace web sites before that market is entirely full. Facebook decided to focus on college first, and the corporate after some success. That’s a niche market. Then Edmunds saw the success at MySpace and came up with CarSpace (for car lovers). Great idea!

HappyNews.com and The Onion saw opportunity in changing up the news. And The Daily Show saw an opening for political satire next to comedy. And it works amazingly well.

The point of this article is to say this: if you don’t have a web site in mind to cater to some niche now is the time to start thinking about it. Look at the huge market for niche video web sites. YouTube and a dozen other video sites are leading the way, but it is only a matter of time before people tire of the lack of focus. Wait until video delivery sites arrive that have detailed niche markets. I can think of a dozen industries right now that could benefit from video on demand. Imagine a video site geared towards car repair, or baking, or even sewing. The world of opportunity is huge right now and it’s the people that look at the niche industries who are the ones that will prosper.

So get busy.


2 responses to “Web 2.0 is about Niche Markets”

  1. Wouldn’t you say the Onion is too old to be considered Web 2.0? The print version’s been around as long as I can remember.

  2. Yeah, that’s a good point. I think my post here pretty much bombed. I shouldn’t have used examples and instead I should have made it half as long. Oh well.

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