Why has no one made a better Goodreads

3 min read

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11 highlights

  • While difficult to be certain about the real reasons, it seems the strongest may be a lack of motive. Goodreads enjoys a monopoly in the space of book social networks. Looking at data from Similarweb, Goodreads records 95mn visits per month, whereas its closest competitor, LibraryThing, is less than 1.5mn visits per month. And if there’s one thing we know about monopolies it’s that they don’t have strong incentives to push themselves toward innovation.

  • Let’s look at what makes Goodreads so hard to unseat. To answer this, we need to understand their moats. But before we do that, a brief detour will help us to appreciate the genius of their strategy.

  • Now of these two types, the dominant behavior is Incidental or Passive discovery. Serendipity allows you to stumble across a book that you might want to read later. If not from personal experience, you can validate this using the site flow from where users land on Goodreads.

  • Irrespective of how you discover the book, the immediate step you will generally follow it up with a search to know more. And where do you go to search? Google!

  • No matter which book you search for, the top results will always have the Goodreads listing. In fact, Google surfaces the Goodreads rating in the Knowledge Panel. Goodreads is a monster at SEO. (Fun fact: Goodreads is the top result for the search term “quotes”; the genius is that people who are searching for quotes are also highly likely to be people who like books)

  • Having a monopoly on the search traffic ensures most new or returning users visit the Goodreads listing. Here’s where the second step of their growth loop kicks in.

  • Different people have different habits — some add it to their notes, some maintain a doc or spreadsheet (more recently some maintain a list on AirTable or Notion), some send as a sample to Kindle, add to Amazon wishlist. However, all of them include friction. It’s also harder to manually maintain an “unread” list than a “read” list. The easiest way to maintain this would be to take action on the platform itself.

  • Goodreads uses all of its metadata on books, as well as the user-generated content to optimize their search visibility through high-quality signals.

  • This external search discovery-driven growth loop also creates a very strong lock-in for Goodreads. When users start maintaining their catalog/bookshelves, the switching cost becomes extremely high.

  • Any competitor that challenges them on discovery-through-search is doomed to fail. They will never be able to get top search slots and fail to build liquidity in the network. It’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem of any novel marketplace.1

  • All of their Community products (and they have multiple — Groups, Discussions, Creative Writing, Events, People) are dormant which means Goodreads doesn’t surface these features upfront anywhere on their website. The most followed person on Goodreads is the author, Stephen King, and he has 0.7M followers. Contrast this to Twitter where he has 6M followers (almost 10X!).

Footnotes

  1. Not sure of this. Compare with search dominance of open library now. A good reflection of how good the SEO of open library will become can be the SEO position of archive.org but the problem with this comparison is it is unclear what lead archive.org has over Google Cached Pages ↩

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