My Diet Friends Pulls the Odd Surprise
Posted on January 30, 2007
Filed Under Commercial Trends |
I was unable to get to the recent Barcamp in Waterford where I would have talked about a surprising finding we have with Mydietfriends.com. Mydietfriends was set up as a user-generated content site for people who want to talk about eating well. As this is the era of user content it seemed like a no-brainer. People diet. People worry about food and health. Provide a forum.
Now, to be fair to ourselves we’ve as yet to launch mydietfriends formally with press releases and the like. But we have had next to no take up of the idea of user content. We provided the blogging spaces and tools, people don’t use them.
What our visitors are doing, which may surprise those of you who keep up to date with social networks, is buy stuff. They buy books about food, juicers and other food related items. Right now they do that through the small amazon shop we attached to the site. The surprise then is simply that the leading edge application we thought we’d provide is beaten hands down by old fashioned shopping. We get a conversion rate of between 2 and 5% which is huge and probably underestimates what’s going on - the shop is a dot.co.uk whereas half the visitors are from the USA and can’t sensibly buy through us. Naturally we’re in business model revision mode.
It raises in my mind the possibility that the social network effect and user generated content is overblown or specific to a particular demographic that we don’t touch.
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