The Cult of Etsy

Friday, January 25, 2008

So I have been looking at Etsy more and more lately and the more I do, the more I have questions, so many questions.

What is it about Etsy? Is it a cult? Some crazy church of craft worship site? It certainly has a very cult like following. The phenomenon of Etsy has been quite an interesting thing indeed. There are oodles of site that are off-shoot fansites of Etsy and all its glory. No shortage of free publicity in that respect.

Now, I knew that there were "tens of thousands" of shops on Etsy. But by that tens of thousands I thought there were maybe 25 or 30 thousand of them. Recently I did a search and noticed that the estimated number of sites shows while the search is working. That magic number was 112,000.

Did you get that?
ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE thousand!
Really, it's no wonder that only a handful of people look at my shop, what with some hundred-eleven-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine other shops to lure them away from my wares. That is a LOT of competition and I really haven't figured out exactly how to use the PR tools to their fullest potential on Etsy so it makes me wonder if it is all worth it.

I suppose only time will tell.

1 witty words:

Andrea said...

I've purchased a few items from Etsy. I most often come upon the seller via some other site - most often flickr. Start posting your flickr pictures to groups and make sure there is a link to your etsy shop on your flickr profile page. I'm pretty new to all this, but what I've noticed is that my flickr pictures didn't have may views until I started posting them to groups.