Free Web Clubs Seen as Boon to All Sides, So Far
In their push to reach mass audiences, large Web site operators are developing dynamic “group publishing” software that has caught the attention of tens of thousands of families, hobbyists, clubs, civic groups and small businesses.
The trend is taking vanity publishing to a new level, letting people create private virtual worlds--interactive forums where friends and family can chat, post messages and share calendars and address books. Some sites even let users create personal photo albums and conduct instant polls. All of these services are free.
Commercial “homesteading” sites have long offered free home pages and sold ads on them. But lately the drive for profit and domination of the Web is making the self-publishing business more competitive and creative, with consumers the beneficiaries.
Big portal sites on the Web, such as Yahoo, are offering free personal “clubs” to consumers because they know that if they don’t, someone else will. It’s actually your loyalty they’re angling for, figuring that if you set up shop with them, you’ll use other services such as searches and stock quotes, look at the ads they post and bring in friends.
Even as they go commercial, these sites are staying true to the global network’s original purpose of allowing people to share information freely. Until recently, many big businesses operating on the Web, including traditional media companies, were wary of self-publishing, unsure it could yield profits. They also were afraid they wouldn’t be able to manage user-generated pages in the orderly manner that advertisers demand. But that perception is changing.
In August, Excite and Yahoo began offering group-publishing tools that allow more interactivity than the static pages offered by GeoCities. Koz Inc. launched similar technology that month at Familyshoebox.com. And DejaNews, the Web front door to Usenet’s newsgroups, released its version in October.
In just four months, with little promotion, tens of thousands of user-created communities popped up on Excite and more than 40,000 on Yahoo. DejaNews got 6,500 in two months. Yahoo’s music category alone has spawned more than 5,000 clubs, including one for fans of the band Hanson that has 10,000 members who post 1,000 messages a day.
Already, the ad space in Yahoo’s “clubs” (each page carries a small ad) is sold out for all of 1999. Advertisers like to target their messages by topic, which makes special-interest club pages a comparatively easy sell. Music companies, for instance, see a chance to put their ads before people in the “clubs.”
People can choose to make their mini-worlds public, private (closed to anyone who doesn’t have the password) or a mixture of both (ads can appear either way). Most users on Excite and Yahoo choose to make their pages public.
All the sites promise to respect the privacy of personal information that they’ll be able to collect about users--hobbies and hometowns, for instance. Clearly, though, one motive behind the freebies is a desire to form the kind of consumer relationships that could yield direct-marketing bonanzas.
It remains to be seen how valuable the mainstream consumer audience will ultimately find these tools and how much privacy people will be willing to surrender.
