It seems obvious that to drive ecommerce success, you need a website. But in many cases that is probably the wrong strategy.

Consider an article in The Hollywood Reporter about Viacom MTV’s decision to abandon the mega-site and create dedicated sites for shows like The Daily Show, The Sarah Silverman Program, and SouthPark. As reported:

The sites join a growing list of targeted Web sites that the Viacom property has launched in the past year in conjunction with its TV shows. Other sites include Comedy Central's Indecision2008.com, MTV's YoMomma.TV and VH1's BestWeekEver.TV.

The sites are the latest in MTVN's strategy in the online arena, which establishes individual destinations for shows and related subject matters instead of a centralized site. The new portals will bring the worldwide total of MTVN Web sites to more than 300 destinations by year's end.

Traffic across MTVN's properties has increased from 76 million unique visitors in January to 91 million visitors in July, according to comScore Media Metrix.

It makes a lot of sense. Fans of The Daily Show really don’t care that it’s part of ComedyCentral or is part of MTV and owned by Viacom. And a dedicated site almost certainly gets more resources, more content, and earns dramatically better organic search results.

Most ecommerce sites offer a range of goods from different manufacturers across a number of categories aimed at different user groups or usage purposes. A large sporting goods retailer like Dick’s sells tons of Nike, aims at Golf and Soccer and Running, and services weekend, hardcore, and armchair athletes. Targeted sites, which have been sparingly used under the name ‘microsites’ for a long time, would give Dick’s the same advantages as MTV.

A look at the Dick’s site reveals a highly attractive and professional site, with advanced features like guided navigation and user ratings. But managing such a huge range of goods has resulted in very little depth beyond core product information – the golf section for example is 100% ‘picture-price-paragraph’ without any supporting information beyond lovely glamour photography. A quick check reveals that the site doesn’t gain organic rankings on the first page for any of the main phrases of that section – golf bags, golf clubs, golf balls, etc.

Who does rank for Golf Balls? The answer is golfballs.com, golfballs101.com, golfsmith.com, onlygolfballs.com, etc. For Golf Clubs the answers are similar. How many millions of dollars is Golf worth to Dick’s? How many more if they ranked well. (They also don’t seem to be competitive in related PPC, fyi).

What would it cost to develop 50-100 pages of content and more informative and interactive features for the golf section, or better yet the new golf site? Relatively little. From my experience the technical issues of their CMS systems, commerce platforms, and in-house IT depts. are far larger barriors. Whatever these struggles are, they’re going to need to get resolved.

This isn’t picking on Dick’s, I chose them as an example of broad inventory, but all of the above could be said about Wal-Mart, Musician’s Friend, Advance Auto Parts, and many others. Of course, windshieldwipers.com, harmonicasandstuff.com, http://shitbegone.com, have already demonstrated the benefits of targeted sites, gaining top 3 rankings ahead of these merchants.

As the revenue potential, competitive realities, and ‘glass ceiling’ in paid search become clearer to the major (and smart minor) ecommerce companies I believe we’ll see a lot more MTV Retailing, with companies running a network of focused sites instead of (or in addition to) one central mega-store.