A coffee break thought:
I have never been quite happy with the term ‘traffic' to describe web visitors. My problem with this term is that it sort of has the idea of an anonymous stream of faceless individuals passing through the web site (imagine standing on a bridge over a highway at rush hour, watching the cars go by - we see the cars and the drivers, not the lives of the people in the cars, they are anonymous).
The term ‘traffic', this idea, this concept, flies in the face of several current market shaking concepts, including:
- Mass personalisation (the ability to position ones offering to increasingly tighter niches, almost to the individual: ‘Mass Customisation' is the ability to build and deliver a product down the individual's specification)
- Long tails (these surely reflect something more individualistic than nebulous ‘traffic'- would an homogenous mass generate millions of new long tails daily on Google?)
- The collapse of the mass media (e.g. TV networks) to smaller, more fragmented media, channels, etc.
Everyone talks about traffic, getting the traffic to your site, traffic generation methods: The term is useful because it encapsulates the idea of ‘numbers', and the term is useful like all clichés. But it is also counter-productive because it smothers the idea of personalised offerings and in an increasingly commoditised world, individualisation is one of the few areas of competitive advantage left.