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Ah the joys of keeping up with those who make up our marketplace. Just when you think you've come up with a killer idea and got it out there and you're starting to see some return on your investment of time and money everything stops. People lose interest ... they move on ... your business dies in the ass and you're back looking for that product that will give you the edge once more.

And oddly enough that's the way many mainstream app developers are seeing life at the moment too. They get a killer app into iTunes and the various Android stores and, if they've done any half-decent marketing for it, they'll see an initial surge in sales ... money will pour in ... and then suddenly it seems that the tap gets turned off. No matter how happy people are with the app ... no matter how much is spent on marketing it after the initial launch ... the volume of sales drops to a trickle and then all but dries up. And for no other reason than people lose interest because they begin to want something new.

The world for many mainstream businesses has changed ... there's no continuity any more. People who once stuck with a product for life now chop and change. Instead of being rock-solid they've turned into butterflies that flit here and there and never settle on one thing for any length of time.

Here are three examples to support what I've just said. In the five months since June Socialcam ... a Facebook related app ... lost 95 per cent of its active users. In the five months since June Viddy ... another Facebook related app ... lost 97 per cent of its active users. And in that same period Draw Something ... yet another Facebook related app lost 75 per cent of its active users.

App developers are finding it almost impossible to retain their users. They produce an app ... they get it out there ... people swarm on it ... and then they leave. And in all that there is a the repeat of a lesson that we adult webmasters should already know and understand.

In one discussion about the problem of retaining users for apps a commenter suggested that most apps don't solve a problem ... they're just a collection of features that might be fun for a period of time but eventually people will lose interest.

And isn't that what we have here in this industry? This idea of swarming all over something only to move on is really nothing new here because it's something that happens all the time with sponsor's websites and we see it in the way sales rise and then fall away.

Somehow I find that all rather sad. Why can't we build something that grows and expands and retains members? Why can't we take a niche site and build it into something that will still be retaining members ... and attracting new ones ... for years to come.

Why does our industry always take the easy option of building a site up and then doing the equivalent of walking away from it by never pushing the limits of the niche that the site was built for? Sure they might add more content but after a while it becomes more of the same old same old and even though there might be new models people have seen it all before so they leave.

How much better might it be for the site owners and for their affiliates if they pushed those limits as some of the genuine amateurs out there have done? Carol Cox for example is still going strong and has taken her amateur site way beyond what most amateurs who were around thought possible.

Instead of doing anything like that we have what is out there today ... a lot of sites that have a lot of very similar content that are now of no use for anything other than bonuses to tempt people with offers of lots of sites for just one membership.

You may find that as sad as I do but when you stop to think about it that's been a trait of this industry for ever. Instead of looking for the long term we've only been interested in the short term and when people start to walk away, instead of enticing them back with better or more cutting edge content added to existing sites we've just dressed the same old concepts up with something that just looks a little different.

Perhaps it's time we learned that old lesson from a new technology because we sure weren't wise enough to see what was happening and why it was happening when our own industry was trying to teach it to us.