The Geek Trend Gap
After countless hours of engrossing immersion into the online culture, following with passion the new Web 2.0 products, business start-ups and technical breakthroughs, I have come to a stark realisation. Evidently, the majority of people don't want to stand out - that role is already served by the popular, the critiqued, the busy, the immersed and the prolific people. These latter people form companies like Apple and Flickr and engage in clever design. The former simply want what all the people around them have, thereby ensuring they don't stand out too much. Standing out opens you up for criticism, alienation, lots of pioneering work and risk. Naturally then, not everyone is going to find it particularly appealing.
This realisation came into being around the time I thought I'd research the available online photo sharing and storage products. I'd been using PhotoBucket for some time and was very happy with it. In fact, combined with Flock, I thought I'd found photo sharing nirvana. There was a niggling thought in the back of my mind however - as far as the Web 2.0 community was concerned, Flickr was king. How could have I missed this obvious champion? It was time for some research.
I soon discovered that Flickr and Photobucket (and ImageShack) serve slightly different needs. As one review put it, "Flickr is a site for sharing _your_ photographs. Sites like ImageShack [and Photobucket] are largely about having some other sucker host that cute image you found
on some other forum, with a kitten aiming a sniper rifle". Indeed, Flickr is more a community of photographers than a picture hosting service. Okay fine, I thought, Photobucket appears to satisfy my needs at the moment. But no one is talking about Photobucket! All the feverish excitement surrounds Flickr, so surely I'm missing the boat, right? Well a little more investigation revealed another important factor.
According to TechCrunch, Photobucket has a 44% market share, compared to Flickr's paltry 6%. Now I'm the last person to write off a company with single digit market share (Apple and BMW arguably share this trait), but the significance is this - people who influence the "blogosphere", that is, those people who control the vast majority of popular, trendy and exciting media on the Internet, actually represent a small proportion of the wider Internet using community. Further, despite their enormous influence over the credibility and popularity of start-ups, these early-adopters have little control over the long-term consumer patterns of the majority.
So while companies like Flickr and Apple attract the most rabid fans and receive all the attention for innovation and geek credibility, significant market share requires something much more subtle than superior technology, greater innovation and preaching to the converted. That friends, is the act of selling less to more people: marketing.