Content Creation Are you "niching up" or "niching down"?

[joelr]

Every community is always in a state of flux over the scope of topics that it covers, even when it's subtle. Your community is always either slightly expanding or slightly narrowing it's scope. In some cases, it may be a transformative change when you add a whole new board or you delete a section.

One of the critiques that I read of Admin Junkies in the past was that it had a lot of general discussion. It was too broad for all social conversion, and well beyond the primary purpose of the community. So we niched down, and while we still welcome users to make themselves feel at home with casual check-ins and jokes, the majority of our conversations really are focused on helping users become more successful run forums.

With the contributions that you and your users have posted, do you feel like you are niching up or niching down?

A follow-up question: is that the intended path that you want?

 

[Nomad]

I find AJ useful because I can learn and share about how to run websites. However, not all people have the same need. Therefore, there are also people on AJ who find pleasure on have nice chit char on variety of topics. If you want a community to serve specific purpose, niching down can be a good idea, however, if you want to build a huge community where people can talk about almost anything niching up can be better.

 

[Shortie]

I find with a lot of forums, the general area tends to be the most used and a lot of the time, it is usually because of the layout of the forum. Some tend to find it confusing if there are a lot of areas for different things and it's like a habit to go to the areas you feel safe and confident posting in.

I made this mistake many times on forums I tried that were a niche forum and it took a while for me to realize the mistake I was making.

I now have a forum I am working on and with what I have learned over the years, I am confident with this forum that I am niching up rather than down.