「Search costs are very real and significant」
. . . practical thinking . . .
High traffic with low competition is right. Because of a thing called market position. Let's discuss that. It's very relevant.
( I saw a post discussing the topic of finding a low competition but high traffic subject about which to write, when looking for an audience. As usual I made a long comment . . . )
There is a famous paper in the economics literature, which suggests people will search until the benefits fail to exceed costs (George Stigler, The economics of information, *Journal of political economy, 69(3):213–225, 1961.6). It's also, basically, wrong. A standard reference to an alternative point of view is now Al Ries, Jack Trout, Positioning, New York: McGraw Hill. That point of view is highly connected to the networks and percolation literature now found primarily in Phys. Rev. E.
Mosts individuals have resources which are not above threshold to make any appropriate search meaningful. They search a tiny fraction of a product space, if they search at all. A fraction that is below threshold to finding sufficiently often the better products they seek, to the extent that search is discounted away.
If potential consumers, prospects, do search, usually resulting in a loss for them, they find what they already know in their mind when they first think of the space: — what's most popular, what was first,
This simply because there's a feedback look regarding what is discussed most often being what is known to most being what is most easily and often found when randomly searching, when sampling a tiny part of the product space. (The market system is an endofunction; output can serve as input to the same principle.)
If you're not in a top three for a subject in the mind of your prospect, you'll have a hard time. Why?
Because there is not a dearth of information, but a surplus of it.
There are often thousands of competitors and nobody has time sufficient to search the product space. So they go with what they know, unless it offended them in the recent past, or what's most popular, or what's first. ``From those who have not much, all will be taken, to those who have, more will be given . . . '' Feedback loop.
That means you have a problem even if you have a good product. Even if you've the best product. Nobody searches much of any space, they can't afford it. So the probability of covering your costs for a product, or doing better, with purely stochastic purchasing is very low, very low indeed. Most people will not see your solution to their problem, they just won't see it. You have the best potatoes, let's say, but nobody is aware you're selling potatoes, let alone they are the best.
Here on Steemit, you might want a tag in which your post will probably be at the top for at least several days, for example.
「The parallels between technology adoption and finding an audience for your writing」
. . . theoretical thinking . . .
Completely agree with the high traffic low competition idea. Here's an interesting presentation by Richard Gabriel at Stanford, a few years back, that also discusses such things, Most things in it apply to publishing also.
Gabriel suggests he gap between new product and beginning of acceptance ``represents finding a niche market you can overwhelm, own, and expand.''
Here is a rather interesting paper about finding a niche: Laland, K., Odling-Smee, J., Feldman, M., Niche construction, biological evolution, and cultural change, Behavioral and brain sciences, 23(1):131–146, 2000.2
Here is their book, if you find that interesting: Odling-Smee, J., Laland, K., Feldman, M., Niche construction, Princeton : University Press, 2003
I'll be updating this post with a longer discussion of the presentation, and another paper of the author on this topic, and a long discussion of the themes of the book and the paper. Both in the original context and then typing this to networks, whether in publishing traditionally or on social media or technology adoption as was the original context.
〈 PRACTICAL THINKING 〉
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I usually write stories which are 10,000–25,000 words . . . 40–100 pages.
ABOUT ME
I'm a scientist who writes fantasy and science fiction under various names.
The magazines which I most recommend are Compelling Science Fiction, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the Writers of the Future.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This is a work of fiction. Events, names, places, characters are either imagined or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real events or persons or places is coincidental . . . . Illustrations, Images: tibra.