Jabes Twitter Musings [Special Edition] - June 10th
Chapter 4: The Nichification of Everything
Just like mass market consumerism often led to lowest common denominator products, mass market internet content followed a similar path. In order for Google and Facebook to do the things they do at internet scale, they had to commoditize the content. Facebook treated everything as another square in the feed. Google made you structure your text so a bot could crawl your web pages.
To get more traffic, everyone started writing blog posts for Google SEO bots, or began making videos with headlines that are click baity to juice shares, a key signal for Facebook to boost your square. This inadvertently led us down a path with a lot of crap that looked the same.
And to make matters worse, the twin aggregators business models are driven by ad dollars, which means they are driven by capturing attention. This creates incentives where you need more views, more likes, more followers and more viral hits to keep up. And you’re competing against the entire world!
Niches are a logical response to the aggregators commoditizing everything they touch. Rather than joining the hampster wheel of content creation, just for the big aggregators to give you fractions of a cent per view, content creators are trying to build more direct relationships with their audiences. This is the way around aggregators. Going niche where you can be narrowly focused. Being narrowly focused typically means producing higher quality content. Or at least good enough content that people consistently come back again and again.
Ben Thompson had a great post on how niches can operate orthogonal to aggregators. Two key points that stand out:
Aggregators seek to serve the maximum number of consumers. Niches seek to monetize consumers to the maximum extent. Google and Facebook reach everyone and get a little money from billions of users. If you’re niche, you may only reach a small number of users so the goal is to get a lot of money from them. This can be from subscriptions (Think Stratechery or Lenny's Newsletter) or high CPMs (Think The Morning Brew or The Skimm).
Aggregators are content agnostic. Niches are predicated on differentiation. Again, it’s hard to stand out when Facebook displays everything as a square image or video and Google treats it all as 10 blue links. Niches usually rely on direct communication with a user that trusts you enough to give you their email address or subscribe to your channel. The result is that content gets delivered directly to you or you seek it out. You barely ever miss a post because of the opt in nature.
Being differentiated is the key. Now this is obviously easier said than done but it is super duper important. With an abundance of content out there, there is a lot competing for your time. Alex Danco writes,
“But in a world governed by abundance, it’s all different. When X is abundantly available in many different places and forms, our default position towards any given X is ‘not interested’ unless something specific changes our minds. These aren’t multifactorial decisions – they’re usually dominated by one single factor whose influence trumps everything else. If you care about your smartphone, you’re going to get the nicest one; if you don’t, you’re going to get the cheap one. If you have something specific you want to read, you’re going to read exactly that; otherwise, you’re just going to scroll through Facebook and read whatever. If you care about living in New York, you’re probably ready to make a lot of concessions in order to live there; if you don’t, then there’s no chance. If you’re a Taylor Swift fan, you’re probably willing to pay a lot of money for those tickets; if you aren’t, then there’s a good chance you aren’t willing to pay any money for them because even if they were free, you’d rather do something else on Saturday night anyway. The normal distribution is disappearing: we’re in a new world where either you care about something, or you don’t. The middle ground is vanishing.”
You either care about something or you don’t.
So how do you get people to care about something? You must start with focus and then quality. In that order. Ben Thompson hammers home this point with this quote and drawing.
"What is important to note, though, is that while quality is relatively binary, the number of ways to be focused — that is, the number of niches in the world — are effectively infinite; success, in other words, is about delivering superior quality in your niche — the former is defined by the latter.”
The good news is, there has never been a better time to be focused. Blake Robbins said in a tweet:
"At some point we are going to realize subreddits were the minimum viable product to many gigantic, previously thought small markets as the Internet grows. The same way we thought "gosh who would want to watch someone play video games."
There are vertical content opportunities for every subreddit! And the more niches there are, the more people expect content and solutions that are tailored to their wants and needs, resulting in even more niches.
And this isn’t just for content. It is for software as well. Patrick Mackenzie, a famous Stripe blogger, proclaimed Patio11’s Law which states:
The software economy is bigger than you think, even when you take into account patio11's Law.
David Perell, borrowed this idea and reworked it for niches:
Niches on the Internet are bigger than you think, even after you account for the fact that niches on the Internet are bigger than you think.
I think this certainly applies to content creators. YouTube is replacing cable TV with niche channels. Fire up TikTok and get lost in GolfTok, CryptoTok, EmoTok, even AlanWattsTok. We are going deep in different niches which is a boom for content creators and consumers who want to go deep.
In the next chapter we will explore how Platforms are the key driving factor for Riches in Niches.
Cheers,
Jabe
PS. As promised, find my latest video to become a Codenames legend. To quote one of my 198 Learn with Jabe subscribers, “Love your videos man, please don’t stop!!”