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Niches and networks are everywhere and will continue to grow and expand as the web does.

Wired magazine is of course the title that gave us the long tail (via editor-in-chief Chris Anderson), a hotly debated but basically very useful way of thinking about the economics of distribution on the web. The “meganiche” could be a useful idea too – it’s laid out by Clay Shirky in a piece called “Tiny Slice, Big Market“.

He defines the meganiche as:

…a thin slice of the Web that nonetheless represents roughly a million users. The meganiche is something new, and it will have a lasting impact on online business and culture.

….Now that more than a billion people have access to the Web, there is no longer a trade-off between size and specificity. The basic math is simple: A tiny piece of an immense pie is huge. A decade ago, reaching one-tenth of 1 percent of Web users amounted to 36,000 people, a number that compared favorably with the circulation of, say, the daily newspaper in Bridgewater, New Jersey.

Meganiches sound very much like the kinds of communities and networks we discover at Spannerworks when we go exploring for brands (we call it research or audit work, but I’m understanding it more and more to be a kind of exploration – more on that later).

Most markets tend have at least one, usually many more than that, meganiches, or at least superniches (I’ll coin the phrase here for 100,000+ user networks) that discuss, share knowledge and effectively act as repositories of knowledge for that sector or topic.

Shirky describes how he first found meganiches himself and offers some sub-groups for the definition:

I first encountered the meganiche concept by chance: I was examining the top few thousand sites listed by Alexa. Once I had culled the well-known media outlets, famous brands, Web marketing firms, and porn venues, I was left with an unfamiliar, difficult-to-characterize residue. There were focused communities (HowardForums and Gaia, plus sites like CollarMe, LifeTips, and SwapperNet), silly diversions (Consumption Junction, Funny Junk, I-Am-Bored.com, Shoosh Time), narrow commercial offerings (NextPimp, YachtWorld), and creative forums (4Chan, FanFiction.net, and YTMND.com).

The article ends with Shirky seeming to both contemplate meganiches as the next wave of web innovation and offering the opinion that they are already outmoded:

Given the appealing characteristics of meganiche sites – cheap to build and run, attractive to a large, loyal user base – it’s tempting to think they might trigger the next online gold rush. However, the days of million-user sites built on a whim may already be over. Gaia, HowardForums, and YTMND all launched at least a few years ago. They began as hobbies, starting out niche and growing mega over time.

I think he’s just hemmed himself in with that “million plus” part of the definition. You find niche forums, networks and communities on almost every topic conceivable on the web when you begin looking closely enough.

Niches and networks are everywhere and will continue to grow and expand as the web does.

Thanks to Drew Benvie for the link.