Who is Dating John Galt?

For a while I have watched dating sites subdivide their possible audiences like mitochondria in a heated petrie dish. In the beginning there was Match.com. Then dating sites subdivided by religious affiliation (e.g. JDate). Then there was demographic subdivision (e.g. the Onion personals). And finally we've gotten all the way down to author-centric subdivisions. My recent discovery bears this out: the Atlas Shrugged Dating Site.

This is simply to good an example of juxtaposing Chris' Long Tail with Bob's Network Law to pass up mentioning. So in the spirit of naming things, I am going to propose Robertson's Law (also known now as "John Galt's Law"):

The value of a social network is propotional to the square of the number of users of the system multiplied by the inverse of the social networks rank amongst similarly themed social networks.

In other words, the social network value of 100,000 people connected to the "Da Vinci Code Dating Site" is much less valuable than 100 people connected to the "Atlas Shrugged Data Site" assuming that Atlas Shrugged is more than 1000 times less popular than The Da Vinci Code.

All joking aside, I think I may be onto something here. In any event, I hope the process of dating site subdivision continues because eventually someone will create the extremely niche oriented "Niel Robertson Dating Site" that only includes two members. Wouldn't that be nice. Fingers crossed!

Comments

[Niel Robertson]

Your point is well taken (DaVinci Code is about 144 on Amazon Sales Rank and Atlas Shrugged around 1900 as of last night). Still a 10x difference. Think of it this way. You're a string theorist and you're on a bus. There are two people sitting across from you. One is reading The Elegant Universe (one of the popular books on string theory) and the other person is reading the DaVinci Code, who do you think you'd have more in common with if you started a conversation. The more obscure you make the example, the more likely the value of the connection. All networks and network connections are not created equal.

[Dave Jilk]

Niel,

Atlas Shrugged has sold over 5 million copies over the past 50 years, and it is typically in the top 500 on Amazon even now. Although DaVinci Code has sold more copies than that, it's not a lot more (7-10 million). And just a wild-ass guess but I suspect Code won't be selling too well in 50 years.

I am a smart boy but I don't understand either the logic or the math behind your law of social networks. Perhaps you need to explain the example more completely.

[james governor]

mitochondria indeed. loic le meur the other day pointed to "pornotube"... which is seeing exponential growth no surprise there then.