Online community: A victim of its own hype, but not a failure

By Rusty Coats
Director of New Media, MORI Research

Published: Tuesday, January 01, 2002

AIM THIS PAGE

In headier times, online newspapers rushed to offer community publishing, opening portions of their sites as public-access channels. With it, newspapers could become online hubs for their communities by offering nonprofits a digital leg up.

It seemed a win-win combination, and for a time, its potential turned stoics into cheerleaders. Yet today, some online directors view community publishing as a failure, even calling for its demise.

Why? In a nutshell: Community publishing lost its way through a combination of lackluster execution, limited vision, foundering vendors and a lack of advertising support.

Which means community publishing hasn't so much failed us as we have failed it.

The philosophy for community publishing echoes the DNA of the Internet itself. A many-to-many medium, the Internet not only allows for non-journalists to be published scribes — it encourages it. And not just for sites dedicated to pet ferrets or Area 51.

Offering tools to accomplish this, the argument went, would give online newspapers an opportunity to increase their relevance. And so, with homegrown or vendor-bought software from Koz, Waveshift, MyWay or others, newspapers offered groups from book clubs to the Red Cross a mini-site on one of the heaviest-trafficked Web sites in the market: the newspaper. All for free. Most services included tools for:

Building and publishing Web pages on the newspaper's site without needing to know html

Posting community events in an online calendar

Creating e-mail groups to send e-mail newsletters to members

Posting photos, recent news stories

Offering chat and online forums.

Thousands of groups took advantage of this service. Smart media companies tied these nonprofit-group calendars into their local entertainment database, creating an uber-calendar. And some companies made money off the sites, selling sponsors who wanted to be associated with civic awareness.

A number of factors led to community publishing's image problems. For example:

Participation from groups — maintaining their sites, posting new information, keeping calendars up to date — was spotty at most sites.

Traffic was spotty. Even on major news sites, community publishing sections generate low pageviews compared to news and sports sections. Community chat, however, runs very strong. Advance Internet's President Jeff Jarvis reports that forums (or "fora," as he calls them) at one site generates 3,000 pageviews per day — within a single topic area.

Few advertisers. Lower pageviews made community sections less likely to be sold to advertisers seeking high impression rates. And with such key advertising sections as homes, jobs and automotive becoming more threatened, selling community publishing sites never truly were an imperative.

Vendor instability. Koz, founded by online visionary Frank Daniels III and once the poster-child of community publishing (read a heady account of its heyday in 1999 at http://www.infotoday.com/it/feb99/news13.htm) — went bankrupt and sold its assets at bargain prices to MediaSpan. MyWay notified customers in the fall that the end of 2001 would also be the end of MyWay.

More than 100 newspapers use Waveshift's YourTown product, which integrates community publishing with an integrated events calendar that can be repurposed across the Web site and output for print use. Waveshift's Kelly Groth said his company migrated some Koz and MyWay clients, but that more than 50 of those former community publishers "said that in tight times, community was the thing to say goodbye to."

The main reason: "They said it was hard to monetize, and hardly any of them had promoted the service or used the content outside the community area. None of them had mined that content for use in the printed newspaper. It's a shame."

One of the innovators — and goners — in community publishing was MaineCommunities.com, a subsite of MaineToday.com by Portland's Press-Herald. Run on Koz software, the community site folded at the end of the summer.

Joe Michaud, President of MaineToday.com, said that while MaineCommunities.com had more than 1,500 groups, "they weren't interacting, their content was siloed, and the content didn't make it into the newspaper. … It just wasn't fulfilling its goal of getting micro-information from local experts in a way that we could use across the site."

What about users? Do they find it valuable?

MORI Research recently conducted a series of online studies at a large West Coast newspaper to study its community publishing contributors and readers — and those who didn't contribute or use the service. The newspaper's goal was to make the section a better advertising buy. We found answers for them, but also learned how the service could be more effective — and insights for why it isn't as powerful as its promise.

In this market, we found the most popular uses of the site were, coincidentally, the exact services offered in the site's Community section:

Community news (70%)

Local events (65%)

Area entertainment (55%)

Neighborhood news (53%)

School/education listings (37%)

These community-publishing features outpaced business news, sports, politics and classified advertising sections. These areas also rated higher in user satisfaction.

More good news was that community-publishing contributors are a site's most loyal and most active users. In this study, we found that they go online more often than general users and are a third more likely to have the newspaper's site as their homepage. They also shop more online than general users and, more importantly, buy more online than general users. And they were nearly twice as likely to click on online ads — a great sell for any would-be buyer

The bad news: Three out of five readers who regularly used the Web site didn't know the Community section — with its calendar, database of civic organizations, chats, local resources and almanac — existed.

Although a navigation bar linked to the section, its cute but confusing name meant that newcomers to the site wouldn't know where to find what they wanted. Worse: Navigation to that section disappeared on many internal pages.

Given that community publishing users make for loyal online readers and action-oriented advertising prospects, how is it that community publishing is "a failure"?

It's not. But many sites haven't defined success in community publishing — by revenue, return on investment, pageviews, participation or use.

Here are some ways to make community publishing more viable for newspapers:

Make data fly round-trip: Leveraging users to help build your online events database is a good idea, but not as good as simultaneously building your in-print database. (Profitability also comes in the cost-savings flavor.) Retail stores and government offices use Web sites for cost-effective data collection. Maybe newspapers should give it a try.

Elevate the calendar: Many sites relegate the online calendars to Entertainment or Community sections. For many readers, finding today's local events is the most important reason they go online. Make it easy for them to find what they want and put it on the homepage. A site that does this The (Vancouver, Wash.) Columbian (http://www.columbian.com).

Be navigable: Online users often can't find features because of inconsistent navigation. A usability test can be a humbling but instructive way to test your assumptions. To get up to speed on usability, check out the Stanford Poynter Eyetrack Study: http://www.poynter.org/eyetrack2000/index.htm)

Tend them: Volunteers working on club sites are just that: volunteers. Some are passionate and some are forgetful. Send contributors e-mail regularly, celebrating new members, answering questions, putting a face to the software. Raleigh's News-Observer NC Neighbors site (http://www.ncneighbors.com/) does a notable job of this and has 2,500 active contributors.

Make it profitable. Community publishing software costs $7,000 per year from Waveshift, which could also be seen as the cheapest way to get thousands of events into your Web site and newspaper without hiring another news clerk. As to advertising, a simple user survey can point sales reps toward the ripest prospects for those users. Plus, the research shows that these users click on more advertising and buy more online than general users. Who wouldn't want to advertise there? Community publishing may be a victim of its own hype. But that doesn't mean it's a failure. Online communities are a viable business — America Online began as a bulletin-board chat community — and are core to our role in supporting the First Amendment. But to succeed, they need a different philosophy than "If we build it, they will come."

Advance's Jarvis remains upbeat about the promise of online communities. "Our Community Connection feature has allowed more than 20,000 community groups — houses of worship, sports clubs, towns — to create their own Web sites on our sites with no knowledge or effort. It runs itself and is a tremendous community resource."

Online communities are like gardens. They need nurturing. If we want our online communities to grow, we need to get our hands dirty.

rusty_coats@moriresearch.com

Rusty Coats is director of new media for MORI Research of Minneapolis. He formerly was online editor for www.startribune.com, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune's website. Send e-mail to Coats