June 09, 2004
Shoulder to the Wheel, Nose to the ...

I've had to focus my attention recently on my company PeoplesForum.com (PF), which I'm currently trying to navigate through a transition in our revenue model. This is a process that has been developing slowly over the course of this year, but crunch time is approaching (in a financial sense), and so I'm trying to bring all the loose ends together, and present it to the membership of several thousand people there. I've been discussing it here with the more curious members if you care to check it out.

I need to make a big pitch to the whole membership there, to make them understand that we now depend on them for support (we used to have an investor that kept us going), and to make a case for why they should care about keeping this particular discussion forum alive. Then I need to explain how they can support us, and how we need immediate help to some extent, and an overall shift in participation in the long run. We've got a number of ways that members can help us make money without directly giving us money (affiliate programs and the like), and we're going to start offering web hosting for sale, but in the short term the pitch is going to be for a lot of people to become supporting (i.e., donating) members, so that we can immediately stabilize our finances, while we move toward our earned-income means of revenue.

My experience from seeing other community sites make this kind of announcement/pitch is that the way you do it, and the extent to which you account for people's doubts and questions, matters very much. Webmagazine Salon.com went to a pay-to-post system with their Table Talk discussion boards a few years ago, and many agree that it was a dramatic blow to their community -- which at the time was one of the best on the web. (Much of PeoplesForum.com's first big wave of immigration was comprised of fleeing TableTalk refugees.) Our most immediate competitor WorldCrossing, which is run by the company that created the software PeoplesForum.com uses (the company -- and the software -- is called Web Crossing), held a fundraising drive a while back that appeared to be a very punishing experience. Skepticism ran amok, and there was stuff like people threatening legal action because their $20 donation was not being used in the manner intended (this claim being based on mere suspicion with no evidence), and naysayers constantly seeding doubt, and so on. For whatever reasons, there was a lot of bad blood surrounding that funding drive. People at PF who were there then still bring it up (the way people bring up Enron to illustrate corporate malfeasance) as the example to avoid -- every few days or weeks it gets mentioned.

Meanwhile, geek community site Kuro5hin held a drive kinda like what I'm going to try, and from what I could see, it went well. They are still around, with an integrated "we need your support" model. So, we'll see how this goes. I'm confident that there does exist the will and the financial support to make it work -- it's just a matter of being able to successfully convert the potential to kinetic.

The main thing I've learned from 6 years of running a web community business is that online community is a lot more complex than it seems. Just seeing the various reactions from people when I float a proposal, or the way one member will come up with an idea they think would be perfect, and 6 other people step up and say they think it would be abominable...it's just another manifestation of the uniqueness of each individual's experience on earth, really.

Every person takes a different path through life, and at each moment we are all wanting slightly or vastly different things from our time here. And so we have different priorities, different tastes, different strengths and weaknesses that color our preferences. And the constant question is how do we all find a way to live together, and how do we settle things when our paths conflict with one another?

I suppose that doesn't have as much to do with the current financial situation at PF as it does with the development of PeoplesForum.com in general, and with the development of society in general. I've learned a lot about the latter through the former. And that matter of complexity -- how each person represents such a different matrix of interests, motivations, desires, and the like -- affects the current financial conundrum very much, both in terms of the success of the fundraising itself, and in terms of the community atmosphere and dynamics. On that second count, I think it's a lot easier to fail than to succeed. Actually, that's the case on the first count too -- as evidenced by the giant trash heap of failed online communities that have come and gone since PeoplesForum.com has been around.

So, good times! Nothing like a challenge, right? :-)

Right.

Posted by Lance Brown at June 9, 2004 02:45 PM
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