From Audiences to Communities
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Everyone who participated in this project said that building audiences as communities was the biggest new source of value in media. Some viewed the term “audience” as an anachronism because it still puts too much emphasis on content as the primary product.
Since communities are formed in multiple and co-existing ways, people interviewed for this project varied in their opinions about how best to build communities and capture enough value from them to run a media organization. Audiences can grow in two different directions simultaneously: Broader and deeper.
Breadth of Network
How to scale up independent media projects is largely a question of breadth, whether it is geographical reach, aggregation of many local or “niche” communities, size of membership or the number of links to a site. “PageRank,” the central measure of Google’s search algorithms, is based on the breadth of links to a site. And, when it comes to viral marketing, it is the breadth of a network (formal or informal) that amplifies content. In online advertising, it is the breadth of reach that enables “ad exchanges” to target large enough segments through contextual and behavioral filters.
Depth of Community
Communities are often defined by depth—a measure of participation, identity, interest and expertise—all of which build a sense of loyalty and shared ownership. In many ways, depth is an extension of “my ideas” described earlier with the added value of meaningful connection. Targeted segments (“niches”) of broader audiences can be as valuable for community organizing as they are for advertising. Evidence has shown, however, that the price of advertising has not remained commensurate with the value it creates by targeting. Instead it has been more closely tied to how efficiently ad buyers can reach breadth.
Examples of building community depth include hyper-local “micro news” that targets geographic-focused communities. Many sites are seeking to become their communities’ new digital town squares. However, a Forrester Research report found that customers care less about what happens in their neighborhoods than across the country and also rely more on sources for local business listings (e.g. Craigslist) other than local news outlets, which cause problems for hyper-local business models. For many progressive sites such as Daily Kos, deepening of community centers around ideology or perceived charisma and runs as deep as geographic ties. To this end, publishers have used offline events to help online users connect in person.
Publishers and advertisers are also learning that “social news” actually means building audiences as communities that engage with news in ways that are social by design.
Breadth + depth: Opportunity and Tension
Most organizations strive to build their community in both directions. Several online ventures provide create-your-own social network platforms that go broad and deep simultaneously. One such platform, Ning, claims that users have built over one million such social networking sites for professions (e.g. firefighters), tastes (e.g. hip-hop music), high schools, cities and many other niches. Jive Software, Pluck and KickApps are providing similar community platforms, but focused more on enterprises such as HBO, Fox and USA Today. In advertising, Adify (bought by Cox Enterprises in April 2008) is a build-your-own vertical ad network platform, which powers SustainLane, Gay Ad Network, Ad Progress Network (created by The Media Consortium members), Washington Post Co., and Martha Stewart among others. Vertical ad networks sell advertising for a broad collection of sites that all relate to a targeted category such as “green products” or “men’s fashion.” DoubleClick announced in March 2009 that it plans to make this type of platform available as well.
The challenge with combining breadth and depth is that they often are at odds with each other. Ning created significant controversy in March 2009 by combining all the members of their customers’ social networks into one Ning membership—a tactic that some have suggested is to reach more breadth in order to compete with Facebook and MySpace. Google built its business by viewing the new model of media as millions of networks of dozens rather than dozens of networks of millions. However, their ability to target advertising has still required the breadth of millions of networks to reach sufficient scale. Now, they are receiving mounting criticism, just as Microsoft did, because of their concentrated power. The puzzle for independent media is how to harness the breadth of the sector and the depth of individual communities simultaneously.
The sources of value for any business model starts with paying customers, whether it is government, philanthropy, other businesses or consumers. Online media has given individuals more negotiating power. As a result, media organizations have had to become more responsive to users’ needs and desires. If they don’t, users will simply leave.
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
I love the idea of moving from audiences to communities. What is the “advertising” version of this? Moving from chain stores & consumers to micro business & people?