My 13 year old is a fan of Polyvore, where users of the site can “play fashion editor and create collages featuring pictures of clothes, accessories and models from across the Web”, according to NYTimes.com. What caught my attention was this:
Founded by three ex-Yahoo engineers, Polyvore has been focused on getting people to visit the site. It seems to be working. Polyvore had more than 835,000 unique visitors in June, almost 25 percent more than the traffic to Style.com, run by Vogue, and InStyle.com, according to Compete, a Web analytics firm. It is also far bigger than the Web sites of Lucky and Harper’s Bazaar. While other fashion magazine sites have been struggling to hold an online audience, Polyvore has tripled its traffic in the last year.
Not only is it getting traffic, but it is getting it using highly interactive approaches. I believe this is the future. I don’t think sites can just demonstrate content (or worse, locked in Flash content). I think the sites that allow the user to take control of the content will be the ones that succeed. If that’s true, Polyvore should do well. Let’s see.
Smart People I Know 