I’ve made my fair share of websites. All of them fully functional, but for some reason none of them have really seen the success that one could anticipate from such a thing. Now there could be many reasons for this: timing, similar websites, advertising, and so on. So I wondered to myself, say I put $100 dollars of advertising into a site, would it become successful? See my sites are all user generated content, mostly because I’m not a consistently good writer, and I’m interested in more complex content management systems than a simple blog where you know what’s going to happen. With user generated content anything could happen. It’s all about reaching critical mass.
Websites relying on user generated content must first reach a critical mass before they because useful. That’s pretty simple. The problem is that before there is critical mass there are just passionate users who are using the site without really getting the reward from the masses. So where does one find these users? Its not as simple as placing a few advertisements and hoping that one of the 100 people you’ve paid to visit your site will be passionate about it. That’s just not going to work. Paying for ads might get your website noticed but what will it do to make your website grow. Another you could do is plant posts yourself, maybe posing as different people. This takes too much time and is too creatively challenging for my tastes, additionally I feel its a little inappropriate to propagate a “community” site by yourself to give the illusion of community.
So how does one see their community driven website from completion to popularity without compromising the integrity of the website? I’m still up in the air about it. I’m sure I’ll come back to this at some point, but I’ll leave you with this to think about: Who starts using community websites and why? Twitter with 5 users is pretty worthless; a forum with three people isn’t really a forum at all. How do these websites create their initial momentum?
