treeline - 5:04 pm on Mar 8, 2006 (gmt 0)

Niche directories gain a lot of their power from people new to the niche, excited to learn about it. Suddenly, they stumble across a resource that guides them to and through all the best parts of the subject they are thirsty to get as much of as possible. As they grow and develop in the field, the directory was one of their key resources and holds fond memories. They tend to rely on it from then on, and point others eager to learn to it as well. They love the organization, the weeding out, the inclusion of very relevant (but keyword-unrelated) sites that a search engine just doesn't touch.

The loyalty of these people combined with the traffic pulls in the old hands wanting to be listed or advertise. The niche directory gets stronger as it goes forward and captures the heart of more people involved in its subject. A few cool web tools uniquely tailored to that niche clinch the deal.

General directories just don't have these benefits. No sense of belonging to a particular community. No well tailored selection of sites beyond the obvious. There are of course a handful, such as ODP, that have achieved such astonishing scope to be well worthwhile on their own. Otherwise most general directories are too general and dependent on webmasters adding their own sites. Leads to an inherent bias. Hard to picture where the point of most of these are beyond a link service to webmasters.