Finding a niche audience

It was a popular thing to say during the early days of the Web that "content is the killer app."

Linda McNatt inadvertently proved the wisdom of the aphorism last month when she wrote a story about a Civil War soldier from Suffolk named Julius Franklin Howell and included a nine-minute audio recording that Howell had made in the 1940s recounting some of his experiences fighting for the Confederacy's Lost Cause.

The audio clip quickly caught the attention of Civil War buffs all over the country. By the end of the month, the clip had been streamed 22,411 times!

Thirty days after the story had first appeared, it was still being viewed several hundred times a day. It's still being viewed in mid-May, long after the story has sunk deep into the online archives.

Content that has an especially high value for readers (even a small, specific portion of all readers) can take on a life of it's own on the World Wide Web. What if we could find such a mother lode of high-interest readers for every piece of content we offered?