Seth Godin on MySpace and website traffic.

After giving us a graph of daily pageviews, which shows MySpace completely trampling Amazon, Seth makes the following observation:

The problem here is that Amazon users visit to buy stuff, and MySpace users visit to flirt.

Last time I checked, flirting was a fairly unprofitable activity.

Here here! It's so easy (for me) to look at something megalithic in popularity and go almost catatonic with overwhelm. It's important (for me) to remember that we're living in a "long tail" world, and it's more important to create content that resonates with a few people, than ephemeral drivel that hits high like a wacky wall-crawler only to disappear leaving a Macarena-like echo in its wake.

To put it clearly, as Seth goes on to say:

Whatever your website, I think you want better traffic, not more traffic.

You want to figure out why the right people will come, not build a sideshow that attracts exactly the wrong people.

Now, I love sideshows, but I get the man's point.