Coinage alert! “Meganiche”

In Wired, Clay Shirky writes that as Web usage has gotten huge, thin slices of the overall Web audience are, not surprisingly, bigger than they were when the overall Web audience was smaller. And thus:

I define a meganiche as a thin slice of the Web that nonetheless represents roughly a million users. The meganiche is something new, and it will have a lasting impact on online business and culture…

[T]he Net is chockablock with special-interest sites and services you’ve never heard of but whose user base exceeds the print circulation of The Washington Post.

Examples include Howard Forums; Gaia Online; and You’re The Man Now, Dog. It wasn’t always clear to me how “user base” is defined, and I’ve always been skeptical about measurement claims about millions of “unique users” for some sites. But in general this seems like a logical — or really a mathematically inevitable — development. And now it has a name.