I started treating - information as a commodity.
This change in mindset opened up many more possibilities and opportunities. Basic idea is that much information can be treated like any food item. People consume it, make use of it and then they want more and more everyday.
More Info:
First things first, human beings (and other organisms) have sensory organs which detect a change and transmit this information to brain which in turn decides what to do (or what not to do). Second important thing is, humans are very habitual. I won't go deeper into neuron pattern formation and other stuff that makes us do, what we do. So lets talk about NEED and a commodity that fulfills this need.
So what I'm stressing here is that when we are surfing the internet, what we are actually looking for is "change". I simply close my email app when there are no new emails. I don't read that same blog post again and again. However, I do tend to play games over and over again cuz the dynamics keep changing.
Videos/Music/Games are designed in a way to survive an infinite information feedback loop and they offer fun to kill boredom (a need). In fact these things make people habitual and addicted. And when people spend more time engaging with something, its much more likely that they're gonna spread the message to their friends. Hence successfully activates a viral loop.
This is not new, created by me theory. It has existed since ages - music addiction, email addiction, adsense addiction, analytics addiction, internet addiction and even stackoverflow addiction.
I think we can classify web users into these three NEED categories -
- Value seekers - 10%, willing to pay money to get things done quickly.
- Entertainment seekers - 30%, basically kill time and won't pay cuz too many free alternatives exist already.
- Have no clue what they want - 60%, irrelevant traffic, high bounce rates.
A website can have three digit growth if and only if they could give everyone a reason to come back again and again. Until now I was only focusing on the 10% and had no idea how to satisfy the rest 90%. Then I figured out if I could update the site every few hours by treating information as commodity that satisfies a need, I could actually initiate a feedback loop and hence grow.
Google, Facebook, twitter, dating sites and all other social networking sites, news websites, games, youtube, digg, stackoverflow and every other successful website in one or other sense actually treats information as a commodity that satisfies a need.
@Jason - Eyeballs in my opinion is an insignificant metric. I prefer "activity" as a measure of growth. Activity as in more registrations, engagement, messages, value creation, assets/brand etc.
Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another. The illusion has become real, and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it. Capitalism at its finest. ~ Gordon Gekko
