Stickiness 2.0

A friend of mine was telling me about a meeting he attended earlier this week, where the idea of “stickiness” kept coming up. “It felt like 1999,” he said. “Does anyone seriously talk about ‘stickiness’ anymore?” I have to admit that I never liked the term, even when it was in vogue as a leading indicator of success on the web. Today, however, it means even less. The fact is, in the age of RSS, YouTube, Netvibes and Digg, success isn’t about keeping visitors locked into your site; it’s about getting them to have multiple interactions with your content, wherever it is. If your visitors read your RSS feed, check your content on their phones, find you through somebody’s mashup and see you quoted in a popular blog, you’ve gained far more mindshare than you would have just from having them spend an extra thirty seconds on your site. Call it Stickiness 2.0 if you must. Of course, monetizing all of that mindshare is still tricky. But then it was never exactly a cakewalk making money from Stickiness 1.0, which is why the concept sort of fell out of favor at around the same time “portals” did. Back in the early post-bubble days of 2001, Time’s Anita Hamilton pointed out that “the hard part for sticky sites is making money. Ironically, the stickier a site is, the less appealing it is to advertisers. ‘If a site is sticky, that means people are not clicking on ads,’ says Classmates CEO Michael Schutzler, a top Net advertiser.” In the age of Stickiness 2.0, the leading business model seems to be to get acquired by Google or Yahoo. Obviously, that only works for a handful of companies, so I certainly hope some of the other companies that are enabling Stickiness 2.0 find a way to make money, and don’t end up as this century’s answer to Kosmo.com.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 8:00 pm