Seth Post In Another Blog

# seth godin | January 24th, 2007 at 5:06 pm

Thanks for the post and the experiment.

First, I want to correct one assumption that’s easy to make but doesn’t match the facts: Squidoo is getting way more than a million visits a month (that’s not an estimate, it’s from Google Analytics) and the biggest chunk is a direct result of google searches.

For example:
dragon tattoo
zlist
laptop bags
smartest orgs

The reason it’s so easy to not notice this is that it’s a really big universe. The long tail kicks in sooner or later, though, and the traffic keeps growing (about 50% a month, month on month).

You also commented on the lack of flexibility in the look of pages. Wikipedia has the same ‘problem’. The reason we didn’t build a world similar to blogs is that most of our visitors come once to a page and then quickly leave, following one of the links. When they arrive, they want to see things in a standard format so they can quickly figure out where they want to go. This is the opposite of the experience most sites want.

Finally, I think your decision (early in the post) to discard what we stated the big win here is (to have lots and lots of your fans build lenses about you) gets to the heart of the issue. If this is a long tail play, building just one lens is quick and fun but not a homerun. But a> why not? and b> multiply by 100 and it gets interesting.

The thing we’re most proud of at Squidoo is that more than 40% of our lensmasters give their royalties to charity and that we’ve built a school in Cambodia, funded a scientist doing research on JDRF and supported more than 40 other worthwhile charities. I figure if we can do that at the same time we direct relevant, interested traffic to sites, it’s worth doing.

thanks again for giving it a shot.