"It may well be that many of the Urban Baby creators moved to YouBeMom, but the 90% of social media consumers, who read but don’t write, stayed"
I wonder how long that will last - if you lose most of the creators, the consumers will eventually follow because they'll run out of things to consume.
Actually I think the dynamic may be a bit more complex than that, CNET will probably end up paying some of the people who moved to YouBeMom to feed the visitors at the original site. You see the same dynamic in indie music scenes, people who are happy to play for free at house parties with an audience of mostly other people in bands whose 'day job' is playing music in commercial venues.
Has anyone worked with Jeremy Liew before? He single-handedly writes one of the most insightful blogs on advertising, commercially focused communities, and "main street" web businesses, but doesn't seem to have the same high profile as other big VC bloggers. Just curious why that might be.
The traffic charts quoted are perhaps page views, which the new design in urban baby website forces because otherwise new comments are not seen. I.e. the data that says that the community remained in urban baby could be an artifact.
I wonder how long that will last - if you lose most of the creators, the consumers will eventually follow because they'll run out of things to consume.
According to Trovus in the UK, only about 1% of most communities are truly active. http://www.rewardingdialogue.com/blogs/137-community-contrib... If you lose that 1%, you're losing most of the value.
I look forward to an update post on this in 6 months, to see if the downward slide continues.