Microsites: RIP

By Matt Rebeiro January 18th, 2010
In Blogging · Media · Social media

Has anybody else noticed the quiet and utterly ignored death of the microsite? No, you probably haven’t and nor had I until this morning when it hit me: Facebook killed the microsite. Killed it dead. Right in the face. With a chainsaw (ok, probably not with a chainsaw…).

With the advent of the Facebook ‘fan page’ for celebs and brands to use to create pages akin to social network profiles, the need for a microsite has dissipated. After all, why pay a developer however many thousands of pounds for a shiny whizzy microsite when you can build a Facebook fan page for free a lot less and provide it with all the same content (inc. videos, widgets, games, wallpapers etc ad nauseam). Moreover, building a fan page over a microsite means you go where the kids already are, rather than trying to get them to join you in your early noughties microsite land.

Yep, it would appear the microsite is well and truly dead and none of us really noticed. Forgive me then if I don’t attend the funeral.

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4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Simon P // Jan 18, 2010 at 5:17 pm

    Absolutely agree there Matt.
    I think this is definitely a trend, but even for those organisations not looking to create Facebook pages… when I worked at HMRC, there was a big push towards consolidation - so don’t create a microsite - consolidate on DirectGov etc.

  • 2 Anjali Ramachandran // Jan 19, 2010 at 12:19 pm

    Nice one, Matt. It really is true - some brands continue to choose to launch microsites every now and then, but I suspect the number of people who do that is in steady decline. It’s interesting that you linked the death of microsites to Facebook. I wrote a similar post recently that was about the death of banner ads!

  • 3 Mike Laurie // Jan 19, 2010 at 12:47 pm

    Haha, dead. Good.

  • 4 Pete // Jan 20, 2010 at 9:03 am

    Yes in a lot of cases facebook can perform the job of a microsite, but sometimes facebook isn’t suitable for the task. Take this for example http://www.verbatim.jp/senshuken/ - you couldn’t do that on facebook. At least I don’t think you could?

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