Community networks, or “we networks,” are so poorly used that they tend to really be “me networks.” That’s the gist of a new article in Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review by Tom Grubisch, who revisits the subject a little more than a year after first looking into it.
The review of sites is a little scattershot. It doesn’t mention some of the brighter projects (i.e. BuffaloRising). It doesn’t get into some of the new models for community nets, such as the place blog movement. (What is a community net, circa 4Q 2006 anyway?) But Grubisch still provides valuable usage and ad data on several sites, and he has some important critiques.
While the community nets aren’t eclipsing incumbent media, they’ve proved to be invaluable laboratories. And in my view, “community” – in whatever form it ultimately takes –has got to be part of the equation.
Grubisch notes that “the best sites – WestportNow and iBrattleboro – have got better over the past year and are closing in on profitability, but only because the key players don’t take salaries. It’s not clear how scalable either operation is. Neither has the capital yet to expand or even hire advertising staff. “
He also notes that one of the more promising sites is The Muncie Free Press, which was started by K Paul Mallasch, a former staffer at Gannett’s Muncie Star Press. The site has tripled its monthly visitors from 2,543 to 8,034 between January and September, and almost doubled its page views from 28,867 to 74,651. At this point, the site attracts just 1/8 of the traffic that The Star Press had when Mallasch left a year ago. “They’re still stomping us in the search engines, too, because they’ve had their domain since ’96 and Gannett heavily crosslinks their sites,” Mallasch wrote, in an email to Grubisch.
Good post but I’d add “transactions”. Community + transactions equal viable business – the rest just becomes chatter without it.
Grubisch’s article has a couple of following insightful comments from folks at work in the local community space that are worth reading. They reinforce the experience in online community settings since the days of 300 baud. The ratio of posters to lurkers is about 1 to 10; don’t depend solely on user contributions for establishing a flow of useful content.
Earlier this year for my own edification I looked at how a specific neighborhood keeps itself informed via online connections. it is the area of Washington called Chevy Chase DC, stradding Connecticut Ave. running up to the Maryland line at Western Ave., bordered roughly by Rock Creek Park and Friendship Heights. The format was a simple mailing list. In the two weeks I was a member, there were a couple hundred emails sent by several dozen individuals. They warned people to watch out for the guy selling bad meat door to door on McKinley St., and to avoid the well dressed, but panhandling woman at the Metro, among about 40 other subjects that were then active. Two weeks.
These residents are all highly educated, have a lot of money and enjoy the latest broadband gizmos. I don’t know if they frequent other local DC-based sites. But for tracking the stuff of their neighborhood, this list would be hard to beat. This kind of community self-informing is what Backfence and others are trying to create platforms for and business models to support.
As Peter and his readers have noted here, the SMEs that local community sites will ultimately depend on for financial success (to say nothing of paying staffs), have been exceedingly slow to adopt the web. And according to pals in the search optimization business, when they do get into it, is often just to get a top ranking in organic search results listings.
Taylor Walsh’s comment about the listserv for the Chevy Chase neighborhood of Northwest Washington, D.C., that he discovered reminds me of what I found when I visited the listserv for nearby Cleveland Park on Yahoo! Groups, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cleveland-park
The site’s content is also built around emails — scores of continually fresh ones that point out neighborhood hazards, offer concert tickets for sale, do grassroots politicking, etc., etc. Of course, both Chevy Chase and Cleveland Park are very settled neighborhoods, so there’s a strong community base to tap into with a hyperlocal site.