Does anyone else think this niche would actually work for a digg type website? Like what topics appeal to just teens? -Chris
I think the teens who are likely to use a site like digg probably already are largely, i don't think that a teen-centric service would appeal to many. they know what sites they visit.. facebook, myspace, stumble etc.
Use MySpace to get your answer - Do a search on specific trendy music/video/gagets/etc...on MySpace and then read the profiles, you can see the ages. The hardest part would be building a list of these specific items, I would build a list of about 100 most popular "trends" you see on tv and then do a MySpace search for each item. Take the top 50 people under each search and record their personal data. Now if you want to save your self a ton of time and you (or a friend) is tech savvy you could build a bot or macro to do this for you. Dump the data into an excel sheet and then sort by age. This will give you some great statistics and allow you to see percentages. If you want to do it the quick/lazy way, just do the seach on each item and record the number of returned pages. It's less accurate, but will give you a general idea...since a large percentage of myspace users are 15-28. This concept can actually used for all kinds of marketing research besides looking at age groups. Good luck... PurplePeeps
Thanks for the quality post. +rep Do you think the concept of a teen centric digg is feasible? -Chris
Yes it is feasible, just make sure you figure out how you are going to monetize it and how you are going to market it before you begin building anything. You would definitly need something viral to get it started...are you a teen? If so this may require some priming the pump by getting a bunch of your firends to pass it on for you. If you are not a teen, then I would recommend you find some, ask them what they like and don't like about your concept then build/change accordingly. Monetizing will be a challange too...many teens do not have money (actually a credit card) or can tend to be very rebellous and like getting things for free (especailly on the Internet) - you may look into some pay-per-lead stuff to win a free Ipod or something of that nature...ringtone stuff should work okay here too. I would recommend some type of non-intrusive affiliate ads instead of contextual ads because younger audiences have adapted to the point where they are blind to the contextual stuff...they know better. As for the content organization - you will have a tough time competing with digg in the technology realm...but there are a ton more niches you can try and capture as your sites subject matter expertise. Example being, girls...they have a lot to say and like gossip. What if you focused your site around being a female influenced social news/networking site. Grab a copy of People Magazine, Us Weekly, J14, Star, etc...and others to see what people love to gossip about (in this case especially women). I could see some big biz buying this site from you in the future if you did it right - teen females are the most difficult market for big biz to conqure. Does that give you enough ideas? PurplePeeps
There are tons of Digg clones on the web. I have yet to see a successful one. I think spending some time to think about a new idea for social networking will have a higher ROI.
I agree that a teen oriented Digg site would probably not work, unless you focused more on the communication between the members. Digg clones seem to fill a specific niche for users, such as finding the most popular stock related information. That's when I realized that Digg needed groups that people could join or create themselves! I did create this very Digg clone and recently launched with mild success. If you want a teen Digg, come create a group!