Topix Reinvents itself as citizen journalist site

It seems as though user interactive sites, such as Wikipedia or even UrbanDictionary.com, have longer lifetimes than read only sites. Following this trend, Topix has transformed itself from a software-based news aggregator site to a citizen journalist hub where site visitors can post whatever news they please.  Prior to Topix’s reinvention, users were not sticking around the site for very long, visiting only a few pages before becoming disinterested and leaving the site.  This change was brought about in hopes to get users to read more pages of the website, creating a higher click-thru-rate which will attract more advertisers.

This is a good example of what we discussed in class today - how some sites or programs won’t have payoffs unless other people are participating in the network.  These include most social networks and media sharing programs like Kazaa or Limewire.   In this case, Topix can exist without users contributing, but it wouldn’t thrive for very long.  It needs advertisers to keep the site running and Topix has choosen to allow more user interactivity to achieve this.