Copyright 1995 Richard Seltzer
This is chapter five of a book entitled The Way of the Web. Permission is granted to make and distribute complete verbatim electronic copies of this item for non-commercial purposes provided the copyright information and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.
My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities (B&R Samizdat Express, 2002), on CD ROM, includes the full text of this book plus Take Charge of Your Web Site, Shop Online the Lazy Way, The Social Web, and hundreds of related articles. It is available from our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/myinperviewo.html
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Today, if you are a publisher with a Web site, you may feel like you're running on a treadmill. With the growing competition for the attention of readers, you feel compelled to keep redesigning your pages and adding flashier graphics and gimmicks to get people to come back. With competitors like Disney and Time-Warner that can be quite a challenge.
It seems that many Internet users are just surfers or tourists. Graphics and fancy tricks may induce people to come to your site once or twice, but how can you get them to come again and again? How can you give them real and continuing value? Remember that in this environment a picture better be worth 10,000 words, not just 1,000, because that's about what it takes in storage and time to download. The graphics have to say something, not just be there as decoration, or users will see them as an annoyance rather than a benefit.
So how can you both attract users and build their loyalty, without having to make large investments?
Remember, the Internet, which has captured everyone's imagination over this last year, is an anomaly. The World Wide Web and point-and-click browsers are so easy to use that even people who normally shy away from PCs take to this new environment immediately.
But while the Internet traditionally was extremely interactive -- every user potentially interacting with every other user through mail and newsgroups and chat and other utilities -- the first users of the Web simply retrieved information. Interactivity faded into the background.
By using on-line forms, the user could interact with the information provider -- asking questions, commenting, and even placing orders. And the latest Web browsers can make it easy to send email and participate in newsgroups without opening a separate application. But still the Web itself does not foster the collaborative interaction among users that in the past was the life and excitement of the Internet.
Fortunately, collaboration and group interaction are now coming to the World Wide Web -- first as adaptations of older Internet capabilities (like newsgroups and chat) and transplants of other networking tools (like notes files).
These new tools will make it far easier to create not just repositories of multi-media information, but rather true communities of common interest, where people congregate to share their experiences and insights, as well as to learn and to shop. These communities on the Internet will build and maintain audience loyalty. Combined with intelligent search capabilities, they will open new business opportunities for publishers.
In other words, we see the coming of a whole new set of business opportunities, built on the old Internet culture and environment. This culture is based on a pioneer spirit of sharing, of helping one another with no expectation of payment. It's a culture of pull rather than push, where unsolicited mailings are taboo. It is an environment that if you invite people to come into your Web site, and you make it interesting enough, they will not only come, they will return, and bring their friends. To be successful, one needs to understand the culture, respect it, and work within its bounds. Then profit will follow.
To understand the Internet environment, it's helpful to visualize a series of concentric circles . At the center of the Internet is the community of users. Here everyone talks to everyone, freely and candidly through email, in newsgroups, and in chat. Most people are attracted to the Internet not as a place to read news or to shop, but as a place to relate to other people who have similar interests. (That kind of user-to-user environment has also been at the heart of successful dial-up bulletin-board services as well as America Online, Compuserve and Prodigy.)
Next comes the circle of free information. Built on open communication and the spirit of sharing, the Internet has accumulated vast resources of public information -- provided by users, schools, libraries, governments, and non-profit projects such as Project Gutenberg .
Moving outward, the next circle is the realm of subscriptions, directories, filtering, translation tools, and search engines. People are willing to pay more to get less, when what they get is exactly they want -- gleaned from all the mountains for free information. They are also willing to pay for timely targeted information that matches a profile of their interests. Long-term, this is an important area of opportunity for publishers, and some are already doing good things here. For example, check out Dow Vision , NewsPage from Individual Inc., InfoSeek .
The farthest circle is the realm of transactions, where people buy merchandise on-line by credit card. That's the area that has gotten a lot of hype in the press, and it would be a natural add-on to on-line advertising, but it is still in its infancy.
The gravitational pull of the Internet is toward the center -- toward users interacting with one another and toward the rich resources of free information.
To catch the interest of Internet users and earn their loyalty to come back again and again to do business, companies will want to build on this environment, rather than simply mimic their old business models.
Don't presume that that's easy. Remember you are competing for the attention of users who are attracted by all the person-to-person talk and free information. You've got to provide real value-added to win these potential customers. To take full advantage of the opportunity will take investment and creativity.
The ideal business on the Internet would build a loyal audience by providing an attractive environment in which users could discuss matters of common interest with one another and with experts. In addition, this site would provide lots of related information for free. Search and abstracting capabilities as well as information that has time-sensitive value could be available for a fee or by subscription. Then on top of such an infrastructure, a publisher and its sponsors could offer all manner of content, goods, and services for sale -- backed by graphics, audio and video -- all the glitz that technology can provide -- and an easy-to-use on-line payment system.
Imagine a Web site that not only provides information but also acts as a "user group" -- a place for readers to talk to one another, share their insights, express their opinions, and help one another. This could be in the form of on-line Letters to the Editor, welcoming readers to react to articles in your magazine of newspaper and to one another's comments. It also could be part of a product support system, where users can post their questions as well as their insights and innovations and look for responses from company experts as well as one another Such a dialogue can become a source of free and valuable content. Remember the experience of talk radio and talk television -- the candid comments of ordinary people can be compelling, especially when the audience knows they too can participate in the dialogue if they wish. And remember, too, that some of your customers may know more about your products than your best support people and may be proud and pleased to share what they know with their peers. Also, remember that positive word of mouth is the best marketing tool. So if you have products that are worth talking about, then you could provide a virtual meeting space and empower your customers to talk to one another and to others, becoming sales people for you.
Depending on your business model, you could aim to build a global virtual community of people with common interests -- staking out your subject-matter niche -- or you could use this medium to forge closer ties with your local, physical community. For instance, an on-line bookstore or book publisher could include virtual "rooms" and "events" where customers could talk to one another about the books that they have read and for-a-fee forums where they could interact with authors, editors, reviewers, and other experts and celebrities. Or a small newspaper could use these capabilities to allow citizens to discuss matters of common interest with one another and with figures from local government and the education and business communities.
A handful of companies are already moving in this direction. The Village Group in Massachusetts is franchising its "village" concept and already has the beginnings of Armed Forces Village , and One Place: a Christian Community . These will be virtual towns where people of common interest congregate and talk to one another and do business: places to belong to -- not just on-ramps.
Netscape recently announced its Netscape Community System, which is likewise a step in this direction of getting users to interact with one another as a way to build a loyal and stable audience, which can serve as a basis for businesses of many kinds.
And Foster's Daily Democrat , a newspaper in Dover, New Hampshire, in partnership with Digital Equipment Corporation , is setting up a presidential primary Web server which will not only include traditional newspaper content, but will also allow voters to talk to one another about the key issues, and to ask the candidates questions, and where on-line debates can be held among candidates in a format where the content remains on-line, for others to benefit from later.
Such projects will use a variety of tools that harness and extend the Internet's traditional chat and newsgroup technologies, making them easier to use and more powerful. Already the Internet Roundtable offers WebChat , which allows realtime text-based conversations. And there are a number of experiments for using the Web environment for events and discussions among users, where the results are stored as part of ever-growing archives of useful and interesting information. This includes one developed by Digital Equipment which both the Village Group and Foster's Daily Democrat are using -- Workgroup Web Forum.
A year from now we expect to see many more Internet villages and communities, and these will be enriched by even powerful and exotic tools that enable people to interact with and relate to one another in new and unique ways. Already we see Internet Phone from VocalTec and NetPhone from Electric Magic , which are making it possible to convey voice live over the Internet, not just as a cheap substitute for long-distance telephone, but also as the foundation for live voice chat -- for live meeting rooms and ham radio/talk-radio type interaction, without the hassles involved in having to type your input. And there's an interesting experiment that was recently announced by Fujitsu and Compuserve called WorldsAway . They plan to create a graphical chat environment. Users will be able to construct their own individual persona or "avatar" from a menu of body parts, and that image will be able to move around rooms and other virtual spaces and interact with the images of other members of chat session. We can expect that projects such as that will use 3D effects, live video, and virtual reality -- whatever technology and bandwidth will allow to help people interact and collaborate, to entertain one another and to do business with one another.
The most successful publishers will be those that build their business based on communities of common interest. The publishers that help form such communities and build their service and product offerings around the needs of those communities will win customer loyalty, which is the key to success. Users will see such an Internet site as a place that they belong to, where they can expect to encounter their friends and where they're likely to find information and discussion that meets their needs and interests. Where people congregate, they will do business. But it will not be business as usual. The successful businesses will be the ones that adapt to the culture and make it work for them.
The winners will be those that creatively embrace the power of the Internet, adapt to this environment and culture, and provide good service to a loyal customer base.
The rest of the Way of the Web
Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com
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Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, over 160 articles, and
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For a thorough discussion of this topic, buy Richard's book Web Business Bootcamp (published by Wiley) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471164194/brsamizdatexpres
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