The good news is there’s a market for everything – that’s the thing about humans, some blow the curve but the rest are still 1.8 percent away from being chimps.

If you’re offended by that, include yourself among the curve-blowers and remember it’s just a joke.

Anyway, on with it. Websites are popping up, targeting residents of cities like New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, devoted to reservation scalping. At least the going rate for the reservations isn’t too bad – just $10 to $25, which you might tip the hostess (sorry, maitre d’) when there’s an hour wait and you’ve got a movie catch.

Yeah, I know. Sophisticated big city types do Friday differently. I’ve seen "Friends."

Sites like these seem to be becoming more common – or maybe it seems that way because I’ve heard of three of them in the past half hour. I’m not going to encourage them with a mention, but you can check out CNet and TechDirt for links if this sort of thing interests you.

Still, it’s interesting where niche markets pop up, isn’t it? And it just might work, too. 

_{*For the record, I never, ever camped out for concert tickets or let myself be extorted by scalpers either.}
 

I say this might be predictable because we see it in every other market: something is a smash, surprising success, incredibly or potentially profitable, and all kinds of somethings just like it pop up to ride the wave until the public can’t stand it anymore.

Cases in point: every search engine that came along after Google; every new YouTube-esque video site; every reality show sneezed out of LA after Survivor; every hottie bottle-blonde teen pop sensation to ever walk off the stage of the Mouseketeer’s Club.

Oh yeah, and the Spice Girls.

Point is, they offer nothing new.

Mr. Liew, whom I said you could blame, was prompted by Hi5′s funding success and did some digging to find out which social networks out there had the highest user engagement.

That’s an interesting choice because it is indicative of where metrics are truly going. It’s not just about unique visitors anymore. It’s also about time spent with potential consumers. A hundred broke customers are worth far less to marketers than 10 ready-to-spend customers.

Excuse me while I state the obvious.

Liew provides us with charts and graphs, illustrating that Orkut, the Google-owned network primarily popular in Brazil and India, seems to have the most deeply active members, who outrank MySpace in terms of average pages viewed per visitor.

Orkut also nearly matches MySpace in terms of average visits per visitor. MySpace is still, by far, the king of the social networks, though, with over 100 times the number of visitors Orkut has.

In terms of all things considered – unique visitors, average pages per visitor, and average visit per visitor, MySpace trounces all competition, including the recently much-lauded Facebook.

"Myspace continues to dominate Facebook on all three key metrics, suggesting that reports of MySpace’s death are greatly exaggerated, Facebook apps notwithstanding."

Heh. Good one, Jeremy.

But these you’ve heard of. The next question is: which will be the next blockbuster? Inquiring investors want to know.

Recently, on a gut feeling, I announced the dawn of the niche network era. But in all actuality, I don’t think a niche network – though valuable for pinpoint targeting purposes – will be able to attract enough interest, from users or investors, on its own.

Liew notes two surprises on his engagement chart lists, neither of which he had heard of, nor I, and most likely, nor you, but made both top 11 lists in terms of engagement.

One is Hoverspot.com, which appears to be, like so many others, a clone of MySpace – very vanilla, very J. Crew, very, um, Microsoft Zune. Standard, a suitable alternative, like tofu, Hyundai, Ask.com, or the other white meat.

But unless everybody defects from MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged.com, Friendster – you know, the social networks that look just like it – it’s hard to imagine it being a blockbuster.

But I’ve been wrong before. I was wrong about Emo music.

What’s more interesting to me are the true originals, and the fact that a social networking site called VampireFreaks.com is on that list. Talk about niche. Are there enough vampire freaks to make an impact, even if they’re really engrossed in their network? Well, they have more visitors than Orkut, if that tells you something.

It tells me there’s a surprising number of vampire freaks out there. But there’s a limited number of things, as a marketer, you can expect them to bite on.

Ba-rum-bum.

However, if you gather up the vampires, the bar flies, and the full-time moms, and put them under the same roof – in separate rooms, of course – you may be on to something really brilliant: a network of niche networks already divided by demographics.

I don’t expect any one social network to take over the industry giants. I expect clusters of them, bought and bundled and monetized, to it.  

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.