Say Hello To A Niche Network Era

MySpace broke the barrier to social networking (if there was one) and brought the concept to a mass audience. Though it quickly became known as a hangout for teenagers, the site has grown to include an older audience as well. Since Facebook opened up beyond the college crowd, it too has grown exponentially. 

While these sites have been wildly successful, they’ve been extraordinarily hard to predict, especially as the world (and marketing world) got a grasp on the concept. Many marketers sang their praises while others doubted.

The ones touting them all along were saying this is about targeting the appropriate audience for your message. But those deriding the concept noted the lack of control – no control over where or how your message appears and who sees it.

Enter the niche network. On cable or satellite, you have 200 channels and watch 15, right? You’re in a specific niche, which makes you valuable to a select set of advertisers. Cable and satellite providers capitalize on several niches at once to boost their audience numbers and charge more advertising or carriage.

If the FCC never gets off its duff to allow a-la-carte programming, it probably won’t matter eventually – the Internet is fragmented enough to overcome that as the Web and TV converge. There won’t be much point in forcing a-la-carte programming on an already a-la-carte system.

(Unless, of course, the AT&T’s and Comcasts of the world have their way – they’ll have you choosing from the content they want you to choose from, accessing it in the way they say, kind of like cable TV and mobile phones are now, unless there’s some Net Neutrality protection…but I’ve digressed.)

Eventually, the one-network-fits-all approach will peak (and I think that’s happening now – Murdoch senses it, which may be why he’s reported to be willing to give up MySpace for a chunk of Yahoo), and they will be replaced by more specific, group-centered social networks.

Humans do, after all, have a tendency to congregate with like minds and predicaments. Membership has its privileges, right? Membership adds a sense of consistency to the world that general admission, with the chaos of its conflicting viewpoints, cannot.

Again, enter the niche network. Hitwise Research Director LeeAnn Prescott reports on three up-and-coming social networks that have grown significantly in the past six months. CafeMom.com, a network for – you got it – mothers, has grown by over 500 percent.

Eons.com, for the 45 and older crowd that refuses to re-label themselves away from Baby Boomer, has grown by over 100 percent. (What happened in March, I wonder, that caused the spike in market share?)

And DailyStrength.com, a website for people suffering from various health issues, has grown by 195 percent.

Prescott notes that they have quite a ways to go before they break the top 20 social networking sites list, but it shouldn’t be that hard considering that all it takes to do that at this point is grab 0.1 percent of the market.    

The Other Boomers Get A Social Network

The label is the brain fruit of social commentator (the title given him at Wikipedia) Jonathan Pontell, who theorized there is a generation between the Baby Boom generation that proliferated at the end of World War II, and Generation X, which has been traditionally marked by a sudden slowing of the birth rate (and a general sarcastic malaise that generational theorists said meant we lacked a real identity, hence the X label, as they didn’t know what to call us…there’s a pattern emerging, I think).

For quite some time, these generations have been marked by the birth rate, with Boomers born between 1944 and 1965, Xers between 1965 and 1979, Generation Y(a.k.a. The Millennials) beginning about 1980, when birth rates spiked again.

(There are numerous names, though, as no one seems to be able to define any of these generations with absolution. Instead, they are divided into ever-increasing, often self-defined, subsets, some calling themselves the MTV, Echo Boom, or Internet Generation, unless of course, they’re one of the Indigo Children, which are a different group altogether.)

But Pontell and his Generation Jones (which automatically conjures up a generation of addicts – they’re jonesin’ for…) say that birthrates are not a good enough differentiation for identifying generations because of the cultural identities that exist within each of them. By cultural identity, he seems to mean pop-cultural identity.

Boomj.com draws the line this way:· 

Baby Boomers were born 1942 to 1953; we associate their youth with Howdy Doody, Davy Crocket hats, and later, Woodstock and Vietnam War demonstrations.

Generation Jones, born 1954 to 1965, is a newer concept and name that represents the actual children of the sixties (more wide-eyed than tie-dyed); Jonesers were weaned on The Brady Bunch and Easy Bake Ovens and later were the teens of 70’s heavy metal, disco, punk and soul.

The Boomj social network aims to provide a place for "Jonesers," who’ve been "mistakenly lumped in with Boomers," to connect based on "shared formative experiences," rather than head counts.

It makes sense on certain levels – my father and his younger brother grew up in completely different times – and on others, it seems both unnecessary and a concept invented to market to this group. But if there is identity to be found for an entire lost generation that hasn’t been found thus far (it’s only been 50 years), then far be it from me to keep them from it.

However, in practice, there is no end to the divisions we could make among the generations of the post-WWII era. There is a disconnect between my sister and me as she was one of the earliest Gen-Xers and I one of the latter. She’s all hair-bands and jax and I’m all grunge and Nerf.

But doesn’t it seem silly (and somewhat arbitrary) to define ourselves by what was being marketed to us at the time? Maybe I don’t want to be a Gen-Xer. Maybe I’d rather be part of the Thunder Cats and Transformers Group, and my sister can be a member of the Lawn-Darts-They-Tried-To-Kill-All-Of-Us Generation.

Is my future stepson, then, a member of Generation Xbox? The Celebrity Cult, or Generation Emo?   

I don’t suppose it matters, and if this group feels, half-a-century later, that it has gone undefined for all this time, then I wish them luck on settling that via the Internet.