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Posted on October 12, 2007
Ravelry – Social Media for a Niche Market
BY JENNIFER EUBANKS
Earlier this week, after putting my name on a waiting list almost 2 months ago, I finally received my coveted Ravelry invite. For those of you who are not familiar with the site, Ravelry is a social network service for knitters and crocheters. As a knitter and social media lover, I was very excited to be able to finally check out this site, still in beta, and thus inaccessible without a username and password.
The site is put together quite well, and even in this early stage, incorporates most of the successful components of other similarly-structured web communities, and comes chock-full of Ajaxy goodness. One of my friends, also a knitter, commented that Ravelry is a lot like Facebook, but for knitting, and I am inclined to agree. You create your profile, list your projects, both current and past, whether they were completed, project details such as yarn type/amount used, any alterations, etc. While this is a cool way to easily keep all of your project info in one place (it also includes a queue section where you can list potential future projects available online or in print formats), the fun comes in when you see how this info is shared.
You can friend fellow knitters, searching for them by name or location, and the site will list people who have completed the same projects as you. You can view any user's page and you thus have access to what groups they belong to, projects, yarns available for trade or sell, their queue, and their blog activity if they have linked their blog. Once you link your blog, people will see a list of most recent posts on your page. If you write a blog post about a project, you have the ability to link the post to the project it references, and anyone checking out one of your specific projects can see the details you submitted as well as read any insights you had on your blog. If you have photos of the project, you simply upload them into Flickr and drop them onto the appropriate project page. Everything is simple, intuitive, and well-done. The ability to mark favorites and leave comments, send emails, and participate in forums help round out the main features of the site.
Overall, I think the site is pretty awesome, and I hope it won't turn out to be a fleeting fad. If you are a non-knitter, you might wonder what kinds of success this site could have, or how many people would actually have a desire to sign up. Hobbyists have a huge presence on the web, and if you search for knitting blogs, you will find that they are quite numerous. There are also online-only free pattern sites, and having their own social networking community will probably see the online presence for knitters rise.
The thing that makes Ravelry interesting to study from a non-knitting perspective, is how they were able to achieve popularity. At the time I signed up in mid-August, I was number 25,117 on the list. When I received my invite almost 2 months later, there were over 15,000 people in line behind me. This means that, since the site's inception in March, over 40,000 people have signed up for a site that has not used any sort of traditional marketing techniques. The creators of Ravelry needed some beta testers and so solicited their friends and a few well-known knitting bloggers to try it out, providing them each with a few invites to give to other people. The site creators thought that they would just get a handful of testers and were shocked when thousands of people expressed interest in joining. Word of mouth from prominent bloggers and pleased beta testers disseminated the existence of Ravelry all over the internet. Sure, 40,000 people isn't anywhere near the number of people on Facebook or Myspace, but Ravelry has not been around for nearly as long, has not really promoted itself, is still in beta, is targeted to a very specific market, and does not yet contain advertising. It is also noteworthy that the current signup rate has not dropped, although they are now able to dole out the invites at a faster pace than initially.
One might wonder if a site with such targeted appeal will be able to survive--only time will tell. But they have many, if not all, the ingredients for a successful site, including an enthusiastic and savvy user base. Check out a post from earlier this month from my colleague James for more info on the benefits of focusing on niche markets.
