There's obviously sites like D*scord which didn't exist 8 years ago, but most of the WWW is in the hands of corporations that I feel you can't organically make it big as an indie site owner. Thoughts..?
There's obviously sites like D*scord which didn't exist 8 years ago, but most of the WWW is in the hands of corporations that I feel you can't organically make it big as an indie site owner. Thoughts..?
>>1
It looks like some lucky websites will become a viral sensation for a bit, but otherwise it looks like it’s impossible to break in to the mainstream with a new site.
I feel like we've almost looped back to the point where small communities (local organizations, workplaces, hobby groups) can do extremely well by promoting new websites/software within their own communities.
Good luck with taking off, though, without someone somewhere spending money on you, whether you're getting advertising or capital for better products.
a site doesn't need to be good, I'd wager population has an inverse relationship with quality/originality
I personally enjoy small communities where I can keep up and make my little contributions here and there (ﾟー｀)
My favorite websites are all small. I say that as someone who had millions of views and tens of thousands of likes on YouTube. 1000 people saying thoughless rubbish is worth less than the post you made.
The point being, why would you want to be big?
The number of unique active users on the Internet has grown by at least 2 orders of magnitude since the mid-2000s, but the vast majority of that population is now crammed into just a handful of sites and services as opposed to being distributed across many.
Additionally, most of that population has no intention of ever taking the time to explore the "wider web" -- an activity that has been made extremely difficult thanks to human aggregators being replaced with SEO blogs run by bots, and search engines actively promoting "trusted" sites over "untrusted" ones.
The kinds of sites that used to cruise along with 1,000 to 100,000 unique visitors/users per month are now lucky if they even get 100. With so few people left "surfing the net", the chances of any new site "taking off" or "going viral" in the way they used to are extremely slim.
What can be done about this? While I don't think things are ever going to turn back to the way they used to be any time soon, a lot can be done to help cultivate site growth and activity among those of us who remain on the "wider web".
Creating and utilizing methods of site discovery outside of search engines is priority number one. Sharing links with friends, creating and hosting curated lists of recommended sites, joining up with other sites to form webrings, creating buttons and banners for other sites to use when promoting yours, etc. Think about what you can do to help promote other sites, and ask if they'd be willing to do the same for you.
Beyond that, a huge difference can be made by just making an effort to actually use these sites, and to post/create things that give other users a reason to keep coming back. The web will not be abandoned for as long as we continue to use it.
You need to solve the captcha before you can post.