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If you can’t build a community, buy one

Fred Oliveira on July 19, 2006 Comments (7)

Netscape According to several sources Jason Calcanis, who is leading the Netscape effort at AOL, is offering $1000/mn to the top news posters at Digg and similar sites to start posting news at the new social news website Netscape.com. This is an interesting move, but there’s a few things to say about it:

You can’t build a community with money

Everyone knows its been tried before. The money is going to make some news editors move, but it won’t either guarantee quality (heck, it’ll force periodicity, which goes exactly against it), or community growth. Jason, you need to remember people participate in sites like Digg not only for the news but the huge mass of people who are already doing active editing and commenting on them.

Not that I agree with the way Digg stories are brought to the home-page – every single day there’s around 5 to 10 news stories that make me wonder why the powers that be over there haven’t changed the promotion algorithms. Still, the fact is Digg has critical mass, and its not because of the few top posters you’re trying to buy out.

Netscape.com has more problems than solutions

… and one of those problems is AOL. Jason, you know as well as I do that the image of a brand has a huge impact in the success of its child projects. And Netscape’s association with AOL stifles its potential for growth (because honestly, people couldn’t care less about it after being harassed for years with AOL offers).

And despite the AOLs brand image – that only people like you can change by giving the company a new dynamism – it is still a corporation: and social networks (the people) run away from those. Have you seen any direct impact of Fox’s ownership on MySpace? No, and the reason is people would get the hell out of there at the realization that a few select people were making all the bucks with their daily activity.

Anyway, there are more problems to Netscape – and even though AOL’s a big one, its definitely not the biggest. The main problem with the new site is the lack of information findability (even your channel navigation is between ad blocks on the right). Who is your target audience? Personally, I don’t really think you know. Because the way it works, the experience, is all about youth (with the quick votes, the loose comment-based community), but the brand (again, the brand) doesn’t scream “youth” at all.

Seriously, now

I hope I’m wrong about Netscape needing much more than paying $1000/month to a few people in order to get the community you want. Only time will tell, but here’s what I’d like you to keep in mind: Digg (and I could be using a few other examples) is the result of an untainted brand, a novelty factor (the way it works) and a specific initial target audience. Do you have any of these? This is where the money goes.

Further reading on Read/WriteWeb and Techcrunch.

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Comments on this post

Michael Buckbee

Couple things:

1. The number one source for this story would be Jason’s weblog where he lays out his rationale for this.

2. I think he’s got good empirical evidence that this works (what are these top level social bookmarkers if not bloggers using a specialized tool), and Weblogs, Inc. certainly was able to pay bloggers and make a profit.

3. There has been a direct change to MySpace since the Fox acquisition, it’s become much “safer” and less risque and it still remains to be seen whether this is sufficient to blunt their numbers.

Fred

Michael: I link to jason’s weblog right on the first paragraph.

Ben Long

Nice write-up. It makes my skin crawl when I read anything about MySpace. =o) There has certainly been direct impact on MySpace due to Fox ownership.

Some examples: updates to Terms of Use regarding content ownership, censorship of certain materials, and the initial blocking of YouTube content, etc.

This can mean anything, too: A. MySpace users don’t care about the corporate ownership, or B. MySpace users don’t know about the corporate ownership, or C. MySpace users know about corporate ownership and don’t understand or notices changes to the site. I think it’s a combination of B and C.

The part that remains unknown is if MySpace users did know about Fox ownership (and changes to ToS and efforts for censorship) would they care? Honestly, I don’t think the majority will care, as long as they have new comments on their profiles. Only the future will tell. This leads me to think that corporate started social networks may not work, but that social networks owned by corporations can certainly succeed.

If Netscape already has a base of regular users, that can become a social network organically by adding tools for participation. Netscape may not get any TechCruch converts, but that isn’t a barrier to success. Success will be determined by the design of the application.

Mind Booster Noori

Man, do you really have to have ads on your blog? Having readers here gives WeBreakStuff exposure, which should pay for itself… :-(

Fred

They show up less than 5% of visits. If that’s still obtrusive to our readers I’ll remove them gladly. But they do help somewhat in smaller costs (you know, like coffee, drinks and code-food). ;-)

Mind Booster Noori

Well, they appear not only on the site (which I find slightly annoying) but in the RSS feed too (which I find _really_ annoying). Of course you’re free to do whatever you want, but if you want my oppinion, the projects WeBreakStuff should pay your salaries _and_ your coffee, you shouldn’t need ads for that! ;-)

Hooman Radfar

I am disappointed with the move. It basically implies that their product is so bad that they have to pay people to use it. That is definitely not going to help their brand image and it bolsters people’s ideas of Netscape as part of the AOL corporate machine. Best of luck to them with the strategy, but I think it is flawed.

Something to say?