User Generated Traffic Is The Next Big Thing

Back in the old days of the internet, forums reigned supreme.  There were forums for gamers, forums for musicians, and forums for fetishes.  As the internet grew, you could converse with people from around the world that shared your interests. Before the internet, you had to work to find people interested in your hobbies.  You had to meet face-to-face to talk with your friends.  Everybody was now a potential friend.

Then, somebody had the genius idea to turn each piece of content into a mini-forum — comments were born!  I post something on my blog, the readers discuss, I participate, and we’re one big happy family that turns into a billion clones over night.

The Digg model followed.  Why go through the effort of creating content when all you really need is the discussion — the readers?  Instead, the site was a community center and anybody could bring up any topic at the community discussion as long as they went through the effort of bringing it up.  Instead of getting everybody to discuss the latest New York Times article on NYTimes.com, some of the discussion was siphoned off to Digg, Reddit, Mixx, etc.  The discussion was no longer owned by the content producer.  The discussion was part of the community.

Digg is now faltering as its centralized-community model crumbles to the customized-community model.  Why should I discuss the latest news with a bunch of trolls on Digg when I can discuss it with my friends on Facebook?  I don’t care what LuvPalin_2012 thinks about the latest news in Iraq.  I care what my friends think.  I’d rather discuss it with them.

And this makes it tremendously more difficult for content producers to benefit (get pageviews) from the discussion happening in the community.  Instead of a single Digg link that drives thousands of visits, producers need hundreds of Facebook links or Twitter tweets to show up in hundreds of their reader’s micro-communities.  But if content producers can harness these communities to drive traffic, they’ll be on the cusp of the next big thing.  Mashable is already there.

So that’s the shake-up we’re in.  Facebook has already replaced Digg and is now challenging Google.  Facebook, or its successor, is going to win.