Just read an interesting article about small community driven sites from the 90s and how FB has swallowed them all up. (Peter - FB is an abbreviation for Facebook - the largest US based social network)... -------------------------------------------

King snakes and duck eggs: How social media giants are impacting indie website owners

On a hot and humid morning last week, I drove through flat farmland way east of the more familiar Central Texas hill country and eventually found my way onto the working ranch of an old-school internet business pioneer. The purpose of the visit was to try and understand a serious dilemma he and thousands of other website owners are now facing. The site owner is Jeff Barringer, who started the forerunner of Kingsnake.com more than 20 years ago to serve people interested in various reptiles and assorted exotic animals.

Back in the pre-internet late 80s and early 90s, there were communities of people with special interests, just like there are now. Parents of kids with rare disease, admirers of medieval plumbing—you name it. Snake and reptile collectors were one such assortment. But like other specialized cadres, they were geographically spread out, especially in the U.S. desert southwest, where reptile collecting was booming. Barringer was among the first to bring them together online.

“At the peak I made as much as I used to make setting up computer networks in the 90s. So this isn’t something that made me rich,” he told me. “Just a living.”

In a shed off to the side of the sprawling lot sit three millennium yellow Corvettes with various, instantly visible custom modifications. One sports a flat air-foiled stabilizer on its tail big enough for a Cessna. A fourth matching yellow ‘vette is said to be in the shop. A giant four-wheel drive pickup truck on a monstrous lift-kit stands tall in the gravel driveway, the obvious workhorse on this mini-ranch located about 50 miles northeast of Austin.

“If certain trends continue, it could all fade into the sunset,” he continued. “Because of social media, like Facebook.”

What followed was an interesting lesson in how the Internet works and how it’s changing—arguably for the worse—for some people. Join us below and we’ll try and explain those virtual mechanics.

All I did,” Barringer explained at the start, "is digitize an existing reptile hobbyist network. It was already there in the real world, I just made a website as sort of an experiment and it got big, like instantly— not through any foresight on my part—but thinking back it almost seems like it exploded overnight. It was lucky timing, I started it in 1994.”

Within a few years, he had turned the experiment into a business, at one time employing 12 paid staff and paying dozens of third-party contractors over the years. Just a single side business turned into a revenue source: Barringer had hundreds of small vendors wanting to sign up for classified and display advertising accounts, for everything from books about raising prey mice efficiently to exotic feed for exotic animals. His readers included some of the most famous wildlife naturalists in the world. The late Steve Irwin, aka the Crocodile Hunter, was one such icon that kept in touch, as did Mark O'Shea and others, many of whom participated in guest chats and other site events. And in a marketing guru’s dream, many readers regularly came to Kingsnake.com just to peruse the ads.

“People came to the site for many other reasons. For example, there was a lot of interest in regs. There are a lot of laws about owning reptiles, what’s legal in one state might not be legal in another. Catch the wrong turtle in the wrong state, and you could be looking at a huge fine.”

Now we’re strolling through the muddy center of the petite ranch surrounding a long one-story house, and the land is swarming with animals. It’s been raining all month. On one side llamas sit resting in thick, cropped grass, their legs tucked delicately below, while another one stands off, alone, watching our every move with those enormous, eerie black eyes that all large herbivores seem to own. Flocks of noisy geese, turkeys, and unusual-looking ducks colored like penguins ramble around at will, clucking their approval and disapproval at one another. It’s Texas, so there have to be a few goats and several magnificent horses patrolling the grounds. All the animals appear well-fed, well-groomed, and happy as clams.

King Snake A highly prized scarlet king snake showing the distinctive coloration that often gets confused with the venomous coral snake. Barringer had hit on a mini gold mine, with the emphasis on mini. For more than a decade, there were no giant corporate competitors to Kingsnake.com. The same holds true for thousands of other boutique online communities that sprung up organically with the Internet boom of the mid 90s. The key indie niche was size: These communities might be global in reach, but they are so small in absolute numbers that they never attracted big biz with an insatiable thirst for growing earnings year over year. Until now.

“Actually, until more like 2007 to 2008. That’s when Kingsnake.com peaked and I knew we had peaked. MySpace pointed the way, but Facebook started really getting big and soon after that, small communities began to grow out of that platform in a huge way. Facebook and sites like it are shifting the ... Internet foci, I guess you would call it, from those smaller site owners and writers and developers, like me, like we used to be, to FB groups on Facebook pages.”

It’s a subtle point Barringer is making here, but one that has quietly snuck up on lots of small online businesses. For the non-Internet expert trying to understand it all, he compares it to the demise of small town America. “Think of Walmart, what can happen to a town when a big Walmart moves in? It can kill off main street, all the store owners, shoe makers, bakers, hardware stores, whatever, those functions all get relocated to the Walmart. Where the majority of employees don’t get paid much. Communities like mine provide a living wage to lots of people. “

Not only has Facebook drawn away community members and the business that goes with them for so many smaller sites, the social media titan feeds targeted advertisements aimed at that specialized audience and pockets the revenue. Veteran owners of indie sites serving tight-knit communities will point out, with some justification, that they cultivated and drove this premium traffic from their small site to their own Facebook pages in the first place. So, why shouldn’t the social media giant share any revenues generated by that traffic, especially since those same big media platforms are already hurting small site owners with the rise of groups and hobby pages?

“You know, it’s one thing to deal with competitors who are trying to take your business. It’s another thing when a giant like Facebook doesn’t even set out to grab any of your business, they just sorta roll over it without really meaning to. How do you compete against that?”

Walking through the ranch house, it’s pretty obvious this is a guy who likes to build things, especially gadgets. There are tools everywhere, big and small, on racks and in piles. There are carefully crafted model warplanes hanging down all over the ceiling in the home office, some with sophisticated ducted-fan jet engines and radio controlled flying surfaces, others assembled and hung purely as showpieces. I asked him if he’s tried competing with the big guys, and he assured me he’s tried everything he can think of for the past five years now—and nothing has worked.

“Maybe someone smarter than me can figure out how to recapture that traffic,” he admits near the end of our visit.

Barringer shrugs his shoulders and says there’s nothing illegal or unethical going on, but it’s hurting his revenue just the same, and probably doing the same thing to other indie site operators for the same reason: Falling site traffic due to group and hobby pages developed on social media networks, mostly Facebook. And there’s no telling how many people this might eventually affect. We’re talking about a vast, diverse array of boutique communities populating every indie niche, plus that portion of the technology feeding chain they collectively support.

Many of these sites generate a living for the owner, and a good number directly employ additional staff. Indirectly, each site needs layouts and templates, hosting services, special coded scripts written and implemented, maintenance, plus authentication and other special server services just to name a few basic items. If they get big enough, they will undoubtedly need legal work done from time to time, and if business is being conducted right on the site with credit cards or PayPal, they need security. Those are some of the ripples spreading away from the unwanted social media splash, potentially taking thousands of jobs with them.

As for Barringer, he’s already started a whole new, animal related business. “I’m going to produce duck eggs,” he said proudly, walking to the bird-proof gate to let me out. “Maybe some other stuff, too, all organic and free range. And of course I’m already starting to set up a site for it. It’s called Turtle Hill Farms.”

As I stopped briefly at the gate to thank him on my way out, he handed me some fresh duck eggs to take home and shook his head in final, obvious regret. “I hope you tell people, it’s not even the loss of money that makes me the saddest. It’s the loss in the community. We have a good niche serving a great community of adventurous, really unique characters. I’ve become close friends with lots of them. And a big hunk of it is being absorbed, mindlessly, by social media giants that don’t even really care one way or the other about it, or about us.”

from http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/8/28/1563137/-King-snakes-and- duck-eggs-How-social-media-giants-are-impacting-indie-website-owners