Product Dilution: Ultimate Website Killer

 If you’ve ever been to a candy store, you’ve seen how the store has tried to make as large and wide variety of candy available to you as possible, and it works, because you walk around the store, over and over, just trying to decide what you want. Eventually, you have chosen a few different types of candy. Many services try to recreate this idea on the web. The goal is that if they provide you with enough options, you’ll spend a lot more time wandering about on their site. This works, too, for some time. We all want to try the different flavors, but as every one knows, too much candy leaves you with a sour stomach and a toothache. Just the same, too many features on a web site leaves users wanting less.

 As a website is growing, expanding product offering is a huge driving force to keeping older users entertained, and generally speaking, it’s not a bad idea to move forward from your original idea, as long as you are still true to the reason you made the site. However, it’s far too easy to go over board with your offering. Product dilution can be thought of as a bubble. As we all know, bubbles pop eventually. Each feature needs to have a dedicated team that understands the back end behind the feature, and they need to be ready to search out problems and errors and, as timely as possible, solve any issues before it burdens the end user. And this is just the start of a dangerous cycle.

 Too many options available is the perfect way to meet a stagnation in new user sign ups. If there’s no clear direction for a website, any potential users will turn away for another website that does have a clear direction. Your existing users will start converging into their own niches on your site, where they only really use a certain few features, while ignoring the rest. If you ignore any particular one, especially older features, you alienate the users that are dedicated to it. Of course, if you’ve moved on from developing the existing products, the users are likely to feel they’re being left behind, and what they are going to do is begin migrating to another website that caters specifically to the product they used most at your site. It only takes a few members to say, “I found a better site. Come join me,” before your user base starts dropping.

 So, here’s where we get to more problems. Your user base is dropping, your new sign ups are stagnating, and you’ve got a plethora of employees working on products you’re not sure you can financially support. You have to start cutting employees. The remaining users will notice this cut, too. Why? Because you have less people paying attention to the products you’re offering and the issues the users are having. Why is that significant? A few lines up: if you don’t pay enough attention to a product, your users don’t feel important, and they leave.

 MySpace is one of the most recent victims of product dilution (among other things, but we’ll stay on topic.) Way back when, MySpace was a music oriented social networking site. In the process of competing with other sites in the market, MySpace began developing new features left and right. Taking a look around the site, you’ll find a myriad of wide ranging things to do. Blogging, messaging, forums, groups, karaoke, videos, restaurant reviews, and chat/IM are just a few of the features on the site. MySpace has overwhelmed itself, and, ultimately, its users. The company lost view of its original goals and purposes, so it’s users are flocking to other sites that have clearer intentions, such as Facebook, who, as MG Siegler recently pointed out, has a problem of their own: keeping it simple. Despite this problem, putting MySpace next to Facebook and it’s quite obvious which site is more bloated.

 So remember, don’t attempt to be the site that has every thing. In the end, the one thing you won’t have is success.