Social Bookmarking Sites Are Changing
Social bookmarking sites are still going strong; three years after Digg opened its doors to the Internet surfers, starved of human interaction. Be it a comment, friendly tip, or a suggestion as to how to get more from being online, they all contribute to enhancing users online experience. Doing a search will bring you many results listing the best known sites: YouTube, Slashdot, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, etc. Great majority of them are not oriented towards any particular niche, and try to cover all areas of interest.
Each of these sites have its dedicated followers who submit their contributions, and vote and comment on others, daily. Most of these sites are very user friendly; understandable, considering the majority of users are not the computer geeks. Some, like Listible are really hard to understand, despite their apparent simplicity. The question arises, if despite the obvious benefits, like: using other peoples recommendations, accessibility of the centrally stored bookmarks from one place, the user becomes too reliant on what other people think, instead of developing his or her own value judgment.
Another major shortcoming of these sites is their limited ability to weed out the spammers, who submit their “news” linking to poorly designed websites, offering very limited content and value to the visitors. They do it entirely for the Search Engines Optimization purposes, to obtain one-way backlinks from bookmarking sites who typically have very high Page Rank, and are treated by the search engines as authority sites. All this helps spammers sites to rank higher. And as for the visitor who stumbled on them? Well, ignore and move on…
Sites that are widely accepted and enjoy thousands of visitors every day are becoming a hot property. Some of them change owners for millions of dollars. Why? Because with say, 150,000 subscribers you have an email list with that many names. This is a very effective marketing tool that can be used frequently to promote third party and affiliate offers. Together with another popular income stream: banners and advertising, they provide the social bookmarking websites owners with avenues of deriving some substantial income. No doubts, needed to run those very technologically demanding sites.
As new competing sites come online, those which are unable to maintain a healthy growth will disappear, counting only a few die-hards amongst their members. Others will flourish, only to be later sold for a hefty amount, to Google, Yahoo, or MSN. There is however an easily identifiable opportunity for niche oriented social bookmarking websites. People want to be presented with the content that is not only highly recommended by others “in the know”, but its conveniently located “under one roof”, thus minimizing the search time. Yes, niche oriented newcomers will become the new face of this increasingly popular Web 2.0 segment.
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