I love when new phrases enter my life. Today, seamonkeyrodeo introduced me to "mayfly content" via his analysis of the new niche content initiatives of MTV and Yahoo.
"Mayfly content" is content that is "small", "of the moment", "out there quickly", and "expected to die soon".
Ironically, this type of content fights against the some of the very nature of the web where everything is archived for all time via the Internet Archive. Plus the long tail and recent prosumer content explosion mean that much of the content online is simply "evergreen" because most web surfers haven't seen it yet.
Hi, Eric -
Thanks for reading seamonkeyrodeo. I agree that content can stay up on the Web forever, and it's always new to someone, but most of what we create starts showing its age after a while.
The real distinction that I make between mayfly and evergreen -- a work in progress, since I just came up with "mayfly" a few days ago :) -- is more in mindset than in actual lifetime of the content.
Where Yahoo or MTV could say "let's create a (or update our) game destination site with broad appeal" as an evergreen strategy, the mayfly equivalent is "the wii is getting a lot of attention right now; let's get something wii-focused up there now," knowing that the resulting site's traffic might well drop off significantly in a matter of weeks or months. If the site keeps drawing that's great, but the goal is to get the traffic that's interested in topic X right now.
As I said in my SMR post, I absolutely don't think that the mayfly approach is a replacement for a longer-view Web strategy, but it is an interesting approach to trying to work with, rather than against, the volatility of Web traffic patterns.
Posted by: W.B. McNamara | December 6, 2006 7:33 AM | Permalink to Comment